The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood

In her fiercely candid if somewhat familiar debut, Hoover recounts escaping Midwestern suburbia for the New York City art world, only to crash under the weight of postpartum depression. In 2009, Hoover was working as a Manhattan gallery assistant when she met and began a flirtation with “New York famous” artist Tom Sachs. After they wed five years later, she believed “marriage would corral him into loving me the way I wanted to be loved.” However, Hoover’s 2017 pregnancy only exacerbated her worries about Tom’s infidelities, as well as ongoing tensions with her mother, an attorney turned restaurateur who put business over child-rearing. Worst of all, when Hoover first saw her newborn, she “found him so ugly, with all my worst traits: weird eyes and big ears, a mini-replica of my own self-loathing.” Hoover is admirably frank about her difficult behavior—including drinking, drug use, and angry outbursts—noting with bracing candor that her “mental breakdown... exposed me as a puerile and spoiled little fool,” a condition she overcame through therapy and medication. Unfortunately, her cultural critiques (“Birth and motherhood did not match up to the narrative I’d been fed, and it felt like a nasty trick”) lack originality. While not without its virtues, this has little staying power. Agents: Sabrina Taitz, WME. (Jan.)