When the Bough Breaks: Sarah Hoover with Her Literary Debut, The Motherload, and the Rage, Beauty, and Rebuilding After Birth
In this episode of Breaking Precedent, host Leah Solivan dives deep into the life-altering journey of Sarah Hoover, author of 'The Motherload.' Sarah discusses how her rage and postpartum depression propelled her to write a raw and honest memoir that challenges societal norms about motherhood. Leah and Sarah unpack topics such as postpartum trauma, the inadequacies of the medical system, and the unique challenges faced by working mothers. Sarah’s story doesn’t just break precedent, it dismantles the silence around maternal mental health and invites us to question the rigid norms we've long accepted.
Guest Bio and Links:
Sarah Hoover is an art historian, writer, and former director at Gagosian Gallery whose work centers around the cultural intersections of womanhood, art, and maternal identity. Her debut book The Mother Load dismantles the myths of motherhood through raw honesty and wit. She lives with her husband and two kids in Manhattan.
Listeners can learn more about Sarah Hoover on her website, and on IG @sarahhoov
Sarah’s book - The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood
Show Notes:
(0:00) Intro
(2:00) Leah introduces guest, Sarah Hoover to Breaking Precedent
(2:30) Icebreaker - child yelp reviews
(5:00) Sarah’s roots - ballet, art, and indiana
(7:30) Connecting over ballet
(13:00) “ I have a very standard birth, but I found it violating and scary and terrifying, and it left me really broken. When my son was born after 19 hours of labor, I felt so assaulted by what I had been through in that delivery room.”
(15:00) Turning rage into purose
(20:00) Cultural conditioning and the female burden
(24:30) Failures of modern medicine and the edinburgh scale
(31:30) Sarah’s acknowledged the need to seek help
(32:00) Another layer of stress - entrusting a nanny to help parent
(33:00) Medical history of maternal care
(35:30) Trauma-informed care - what needs to change
(39:00) AI medical care becoming preferred over human medical care?
(40:00) Leah shares her surrogacy experience and seeing birth from the other side
(43:00) What writing has taught Sarah
(50:45) Question: What's one piece of parenting advice you think is bullshit?
(53:00) Breaking precedents - you can’t have it all (at once)
---
Leah Solivan is the host of Breaking Precedent, a podcast that explores the stories of innovators who are pushing societal boundaries and setting new precedents in their fields. Leah is General Partner at Fuel Capital, where she invests in early-stage companies across consumer technology, hardware, education, marketplaces, and retail. Leah has 15 years of experience building and creating technology products that have reached millions of people around the globe. She started her career at IBM as an engineer in the software group, working on Lotus Notes and Domino. In 2008, Leah founded TaskRabbit, the leading on-demand service marketplace in the world.
Connect with Leah:
Website: breakingprecedent.com/
Instagram: @labunleashed
