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Sarah Hoover memoir ‘The Motherload’ to be adapted for TV
The book lays bare the author’s feelings of despair, rage, guilt and anxiety as a new mother
November 11, 2025 17:10
The book lays bare the author’s feelings of despair, rage, guilt and anxiety as a new mother
November 11, 2025 17:10Jewish author Sarah Hoover’s bestselling memoir detailing her experiences of postnatal depression is to be adapted into a TV series.
The Motherload: Episodes From the Brink of Motherhood lays bare Hoover’s feelings of despair, rage, guilt and anxiety Hoover endured in the months after she gave birth to her first child in 2017.
A TV series is now in development at production company 20th Television, with New York-based filmmaker Stuart Zicherman attached as the showrunner, according to industry publication Variety.
Hoover is said to be co-writing the pilot with actor and writer Sas Goldberg, who is also Jewish, and contributed to the final season of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel.
The Motherload will follow millennial art dealer Jennifer who discovers that motherhood does not match her expectations: “Instead of joy, it is turning out to be months of rage, brain fog, self-medication, and a scorched earth policy towards her husband,” a summary of the show released by 20th Television states.
“A total surrender of sex, career and identity results, and Jennifer realises she’ll never be able to find her way to fulfilment in parenthood without the hardest of looks at herself, her relationship to her own mother, to men, and to the condition of being a woman who despises bulls*** mummy narratives.”
Indiana-born Hoover, who lives in New York City with her husband and their two children, posted on Instagram: “On my birthday I pitched The Motherload to 20th Century Studios via Zoom then sat in the dark by myself and did not eat a single piece of cake because I was scared to celebrate anything (including my own birth) before the ink was dry.”
Speaking to the JC earlier this year when the book was published Hoover described the sense of “alienation” she felt from everything she expected to come with motherhood – including bonding with her baby – as well as the nightmare of psychosis.
She told the JC: “I thought I absolutely hated being a mum. And I thought I was a total failure of a woman, because I was not, in my mind, a good fit for it – my maternal instincts didn’t kick in. It’s not like I had a baby and I fell in love with him, and all of a sudden I became a mother.”
Hoover added: “I think part of the depression is a rational response to an insane thing that happens in a world that does not respect motherhood or fully acknowledge how difficult it is to be a woman. Nothing about our world makes it easy for mothers … I want women to know you can come through the other side.”
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