“They’re so pretty and lush,” Sarah Hoover said while looking at a painting by Cecily Brown. Featuring a swirl of pastels, the piece was characteristic of the artist, who is known for colorful, frenetic works that appear abstract but reveal distinct and often explicit figures, when observed closely.
“They’re a little pornographic and a little filthy,” Ms. Hoover added. It was a Saturday morning in November, and she had just arrived at the Paula Cooper Gallery in the Chelsea section of Manhattan to see an exhibition of Ms. Brown’s paintings.
Ms. Hoover, 40, a former gallery director who left her job to pursue a writing career, refers to the artist’s works in a new memoir out this month. She describes another of Ms. Brown’s artworks — a velvety expanse with ecstatic lines that form tiny penises — as representative of her ideal mental state.
The convergence of pretty and dirty is a through line in Ms. Hoover’s book, “The Motherload: Episodes From the Brink of Motherhood.” She writes about attending fabulous parties while coping with harrowing nightmares and vicious anxiety after the birth of her first child, a son, in October 2017. She also untangles some knots in her marriage to the artist Tom Sachs. The couple had their second child, a daughter, last April.
Ms. Hoover began writing “The Motherload” toward the end of a 14-year career at the Gagosian Gallery, during which she cultivated a reputation as a savvy art-world fixture with a bubbly demeanor, a passion for contemporary painters and a wardrobe of flouncy Chanel minidresses hemmed a precise 32 inches below her collarbone.
In the book, Ms. Hoover presents a far less polished version of herself, beginning by quoting part of the invitation to her first baby shower, held at the Château Marmont hotel in West Hollywood, Calif., several months after her son was born: “No gifts unless it’s drugs.”
The cheeky line was a foil for her postpartum depression, which manifested in a potent mix of self-loathing, apathy for her son and rage toward her husband.
She writes about losing faith in doctors after her obstetrician performed an extra vaginal suture known as a “husband stitch” without her consent after the birth of her son. For her daughter’s birth, Ms. Hoover saw a different obstetrician and demanded that she be consulted about every procedure “even if it’s in the name of medicine.”
“I don’t want to speak for other women,” Ms. Hoover said as she walked out of Ms. Brown’s art exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery. “But I’ve learned in my own life of being a woman that saying your most shameful thing out loud most often has resulted in other people being like: ‘Oh my god, me too. I’m so glad someone said it.’”
Hours earlier, she was at home with Mr. Sachs, 58, and snuggling her daughter, who was bundled up in a lilac cashmere cardigan. Their apartment, comprising the top two floors of a small building in NoLiTa, has a breakfast nook, a balcony overlooking an interior courtyard and curated touches that impart a sense of nonchalant luxury.
There’s a handwritten sign noting the home’s “no shoes” policy and a silver mint julep cup stuffed with toothbrushes on a bathroom counter. The living room is furnished with moss-green velvet curtains and a painting of passenger pigeons that the artist Walton Ford made for Ms. Hoover. On a side table were more paintings that the couple’s son, now 7, made at camp.
Over breakfast — waffles, bacon, and toast prepared by Ms. Hoover and pour-over coffee made by Mr. Sachs — the two exchanged what at times sounded like practiced banter.
“She’s extremely well trained,” Mr. Sachs said of their stout 3-year-old French bulldog, Donut, who was nosing around as they ate.
Ms. Hoover interjected: “No, no, no, she’s received a considerable amount of training.”
Mr. Sachs compared his life before Ms. Hoover to that of Steve Jobs, specifically to Mr. Jobs’s living without a sofa for several years because he couldn’t find one to his liking. “I was always on that path to be the man who lived without curtains or a sofa,” he said. “One of the many great things that Sarah brought to my life is civility.”
Ms. Hoover deadpanned in reply: “You’re so lucky you met me.”
Ms. Hoover has particular tastes. She rarely watches television. She reads widely, but almost exclusively books by women. “It’s really hard to hear about male perspectives,” she said, adding that she has sworn off “the Jonathans” (Franzen, Safran Foer, Lethem).
Art history, ballet, complaining, being spoiled, clotted cream, loaded baked potatoes, her dog, psychedelics, full-bodied red wines, folding laundry, organizing her children’s clothes and colorful platform heels are all things she loves. She’s ambivalent about hotels. She hates pencils.
Jenna Lyons, the fashion designer turned “Real Housewife” and a longtime friend of Mr. Sachs’s, recalled her initial surprise at his interest in Ms. Hoover. When they met in 2007, Ms. Hoover was 23, and he was 41.
“I was teasing him because she was so much younger than him,” said Ms. Lyons, 56, who is a partner at FundamentalCo, a branding company. “I was like, ‘Come on, Tom.’” Then she met Ms. Hoover at an art event. “She brings her dog, which I was dying about,” Ms. Lyons said. “I was like, ‘This girl is a spitfire!’ She does not placate or hide things or mince words.”
If Ms. Hoover has engendered civility in her husband, an artist known for his provocative works and behavior, he has pushed her to be more brazen. In “The Motherload,” Ms. Hoover writes that after telling Mr. Sachs about a woman who was impolite to her, he said: “You’re allowed to be more of a bitch.”
She also recounts how Mr. Sachs has rewarded her shamelessness with gestures that have included the publication of a zine, “My Beautiful, Poorly Behaved Wife,” in 2018. (Ms. Lyons still has a copy.) Its imagery included a picture of a wet towel that Ms. Hoover left on a bed, as well as another photo of a bag of dog feces that she left in the hallway of an apartment building where she used to live. (Ms. Hoover explained that her unit was the only one on that hallway: “I am lazy, but not a monster!” she said.)
Behaving irreverently is something she was encouraged to do well before she met Mr. Sachs. When Ms. Hoover was a high school student in Indianapolis, Ind., her mother, Martha Hoover, a restaurateur, didn’t just allow her to break a dress-code rule about hem length — she took Ms. Hoover to a tailor to have a cheerleading uniform altered. “Anything I could shorten, I shortened,” Ms. Hoover said.
As she was drafting “The Motherload,” Ms. Hoover wrote articles about motherhood for publications like New York magazine and Vogue. They involved semi-taboo parenting topics: how she doesn’t like to play with her son, for example.
Last year, as she was working on the book, Ms. Hoover’s and Mr. Sachs’s domestic life became a topic of conversation as people speculated that they were the “art world family” that posted a classified ad for an assistant. The job description included managing children, dogs, chefs, landscapers, housekeepers, guests and closets; the quoted salary was between $65,000 and $95,000. Ms. Hoover, in an interview for this article, said she did not post the ad.
It received outsize attention partly because the ad appeared weeks before New York magazine published an article with allegations that Mr. Sachs ran a cultlike workplace and harassed employees. He has since issued a statement apologizing to those who felt unsupported or unsafe at his studio and denying any claims of harassment.
The faults and failings of Mr. Sachs that Ms. Hoover shares in “The Motherload” — his aloofness during her first pregnancy, his complaints about burning his tongue on French fries right after she gave birth, his flirtations with other women — portray him as prone to thoughtlessness and duplicity. But he instructed Ms. Hoover not to go easy on him, she said.
“‘You’re an artist now,’” she recalled him telling her. “‘You’re going to have to do things that are embarrassing. You’re going to have to tell your shame. Make me sound as bad as you need to.’”
After each of her pregnancies, Ms. Hoover and Mr. Sachs hired the same live-in baby nurse for a period of time. The nurse “modeled for me the way to be a mom,” Ms. Hoover said. “She modeled true kindness and goodness and openness to these tiny creatures.”
In the book, she writes that employing caretakers is standard in their circle of friends: “Isn’t spending money to give someone a job and help make parenting more of a delight the whole point of working hard?”
Ms. Hoover’s friends include other mothers around her age, like the “Sweetbitter” author Stephanie Danler, and Nell Diamond, the founder of Hill House Home, the clothing line known for its nap dresses.
Ms. Diamond, 35, said that she and Ms Hoover shared an interest in “pretty, sparkly, shiny things,” as well as in art history, literature and feminism. “I think both of us really love murderous women in that Gothic literature way,” Ms. Diamond said. “Especially when it’s obviously contradicted with hyperfemininity.”
Ms. Danler, 41, said Ms. Hoover had one of “the most gifted social minds” that she has ever come across. “She has impeccable taste, and I think that no one has written about postpartum depression the way that she has,” Ms. Danler added. “It widens the spectrum of experiences that we’re able to talk about as mothers.”
These days, Ms. Hoover takes her son to school in Brooklyn on some mornings and does bedtime three nights a week, which she’s very strict about, she said. Other nights, she tries to see art, preferably dance. Now that she has another child, she says she has been luxuriating in certain things she didn’t do the first time around, especially long walks with her daughter in a stroller. (She aims for three a day.) She writes from Mr. Sachs’s studio, which is a few blocks from their apartment.
Ms. Hoover knows that “The Motherload” offers less than flattering glimpses of herself. She’s also aware that it may make her husband “sound bad,” she said. But she has found power in opening up about the turmoil, angst and mess swirling around in her outwardly pretty life.
“I gave up on worrying about being embarrassing,” Ms. Hoover said. “Caring about being embarrassing didn’t get me anywhere.”
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