
The Motherload
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Narrated by:
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Sarah Hoover
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By:
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Sarah Hoover
About this listen
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
“A long overdue reality check.” —Oprah Daily
“Honest, unapologetic, and brutally funny.” —Stephanie Danler, New York Times bestselling author of Sweetbitter
An unflinching motherhood memoir that dares to ask what happens when “what to expect when you’re expecting” turns out to be months of rage, anguish, brain fog, and a total surrender of sex, career, and identity.
“The kid was objectively a tiny worm, even worse, a worm with my nose.” Welcome to Sarah Hoover’s candid and propulsive take on motherhood where she turns the ecstatic narrative women have been fed—one of immediate connection to your child followed by a joyful path of maternal discovery—on its head.
Like most of us, Sarah Hoover grew up imagining a certain life for herself, and when she moved from Indiana to New York City to study art history, the life she’d imagined began falling into place. She got her degree in art history, landed a job in a gallery, made friends, and met interesting artists, one of whom became her husband. But when Hoover got pregnant, everything in her life began to unravel.
She felt like an imposter in her own body. She grew distant from her friends and husband. Anxiety, fear, guilt, and shame threatened to swallow her. She also experienced trauma at the hands of one of her doctors—a stark trigger. And when her son was born, there was no… joy.
Her despair was persistent, even with help, therapy, and pills. Grieving a lost identity and angry at the world around her, she found herself despising her baby, her husband, and herself. She was afraid it might not end. With the help of a doctor’s diagnosis, Hoover began to understand the cluster of symptoms that informed her experience—she was drowning in postpartum depression—and that she wasn’t a bad mother or a failed woman.
At its core, The Motherload is about learning to forgive yourself. It’s a rejection of the cultural idea of the mother as a perfect being. And it’s an honest, propulsive, and often funny take on the vicissitudes of marriage, life, and parenting—a motherhood memoir unlike any other.
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- Unabridged
-
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Max didn’t believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he is still here, he watches his girlfriend, Hannah, lost in grief in the apartment they shared and begins to realize how much of her life was invisible to him. In the weeks and months before Max’s death, Hannah was haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seemed to offer the potential of a fresh new chapter, but the past refused to stay hidden.
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Nothing to keep me interested.
- By Cari Brotherton on 03-07-25
By: Evie Wyld
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A Good Mom's Guide to Making Bad Choices
- By: Jamilah Mapp, Erica Dickerson
- Narrated by: Jamilah Mapp, Erica Dickerson
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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They are everywhere on social media. Images of perfect, pleasant women with perfect, pretty children in perfect, tidy homes—the epitome of “good” moms. But this model of motherhood is an illusion that far too many women either measure themselves against or simply cannot relate to in the first place. Enter Jamilah Mapp and Erica Dickerson: if you are sex-positive, cannabis-friendly, and love sharing NSFW stories with your fellow mom friends, you’re not doing anything wrong and you are definitely not a bad mother. And Jamilah and Erica are your tribe.
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LOVE IT
- By Alyssa Rowden on 05-09-23
By: Jamilah Mapp, and others
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Say Everything
- A Memoir
- By: Ione Skye
- Narrated by: Ione Skye
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Gen X icon Ione Skye bares all in an achingly vulnerable coming-of-age memoir about chasing fame, desire, and true love in the shadow of her famous, absent father.
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Wow
- By santos on 03-11-25
By: Ione Skye
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The Guilt Pill
- A Novel
- By: Saumya Dave
- Narrated by: Sharmila Devar
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Maya Patel has it all—her own start-up, a sexy, doting husband, influencer status, and now, a new baby. But behind closed doors, Maya's drowning. Her newborn is taking a toll on her marriage, her best friend won't return her calls, and her company's hanging on by a thread. The worst part? It's all her fault. If she could just be a better boss, mother, wife, daughter, friend… Maybe she wouldn't feel so guilty all the time. Enter: #Girlboss Liz Anderson, who introduces her to the "guilt pill," an experimental supplement that erases female guilt.
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Couldn’t put it down
- By Nehahaha on 05-24-25
By: Saumya Dave
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My Body
- By: Emily Ratajkowski
- Narrated by: Emily Ratajkowski
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Emily Ratajkowski is an acclaimed model and actress, an engaged political progressive, a formidable entrepreneur, a global social media phenomenon, and now, a writer. Rocketing to world fame at age 21, Ratajkowski sparked both praise and furor with the provocative display of her body as an unapologetic statement of feminist empowerment. The subsequent evolution in her thinking about our culture’s commodification of women is the subject of this book.
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so vain..
- By Emily Valdez on 01-10-22
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Four Mothers
- An Intimate Journey Through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries
- By: Abigail Leonard
- Narrated by: Eleanor Caudill
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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As debates surrounding paid leave, universal daycare, and national healthcare rage on, Four Mothers is an intimate portrait of what those policies mean in the everyday lives of four women—and a compelling argument for the necessity and urgency of supporting parents.
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Fantastic, inspiring, everyone should dread this book!
- By sarah b-s on 07-03-25
By: Abigail Leonard
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Awake
- A Memoir
- By: Jen Hatmaker
- Narrated by: Jen Hatmaker
- Length: 5 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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An Avid Reader Press book. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every listener.At 2:30 a.m. on July 11th, 2020, Jen Hatmaker woke up to her husband of twenty-six years whispering in his phone to another woman from their bed. It was the end of life as she knew it. In the months that followed, she went from being a shiny, funny, popular leader, to a divorced wreck on antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds parenting five kids alone with no clue about her own bank accounts.
By: Jen Hatmaker
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Dream State
- A Novel
- By: Eric Puchner
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 13 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her in-laws’ beautiful lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a medical student with a brilliant future. Charlie asks Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate, though Cece can’t imagine anyone less appropriate for the task; Garrett doesn’t believe in love, much less marriage. But as she spends time with Garrett, and his gruff mask slips, her long-held expectations for her life with Charlie begin to crumble, her feelings for Garrett—haunted by a tragic event from his past—become impossible to bury.
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An Enthralling Listen
- By Regina on 02-20-25
By: Eric Puchner
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Operating Instructions
- A Journal of My Son's First Year
- By: Anne Lamott
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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It’s not like she’s the only woman to ever have a baby. At 35. On her own. But Anne Lamott makes it all fresh in her now-classic account of how she and her son and numerous friends and neighbors and some strangers survived and thrived in that all-important first year. From finding out her baby is a boy (and getting used to the idea) to finding out her best friend and greatest supporter, Pam, will die of cancer (and not getting used to that idea), with a generous amount of wit and faith (but little piousness), Lamott narrates the great and small events making up a woman’s life.
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Funny. Uplifting.
- By quiltbrain on 11-19-20
By: Anne Lamott
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Once upon a Time
- The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy
- By: Elizabeth Beller
- Narrated by: Emily Tremaine
- Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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A quarter of a century after the plane crash that claimed the lives of John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn, and her sister Lauren, the magnitude of this tragedy remains fresh. Yet, Carolyn is still an enigmatic figure, a woman whose life in the spotlight was besieged with misogyny and cruelty. Elizabeth Beller explores the real person behind the tabloid headlines and media frenzy. When she began dating America’s prince, Carolyn was increasingly thrust into an overwhelming spotlight filled with relentless paparazzi who reacted to her reserve with a campaign of harassment and vilification.
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Exaggeratingly Fawning
- By NedNickelson on 05-22-24
By: Elizabeth Beller
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Childhood Disrupted
- How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal
- By: Donna Jackson Nakazawa
- Narrated by: Callie Beaulieu
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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The emotional trauma we suffer as children not only shapes our emotional lives as adults but also affects our physical health and overall well-being. Scientists now know on a biochemical level exactly how parents' chronic fights, divorce, death in the family, being bullied or hazed, and growing up with a hypercritical, alcoholic, or mentally ill parent can leave permanent, physical "fingerprints" on our brains.
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some disturbing content, overall very imformative
- By Tryintolivenatural on 11-12-15
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The Bright Hour
- A Memoir of Living and Dying
- By: Nina Riggs
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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An exquisite memoir about how to live - and love - every day with "death in the room", from poet Nina Riggs, mother of two young sons and the direct descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the tradition of When Breath Becomes Air.
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Awe inspiring legacy of A Brave Young Woman.
- By Julia on 06-18-17
By: Nina Riggs
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You Can't Have It All
- The Basic B*tch Guide to Taking the Pressure Off
- By: Stassi Schroeder
- Narrated by: Stassi Schroeder
- Length: 6 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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The two-time New York Times bestselling author, OG Vanderpump Rules star, and host of the successful chart-topping podcast Stassi is back and better than ever with a candid guide to rethinking the girlboss life, taking the pressure off, and lessons she’s learned since becoming a mom of two.
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Relatable
- By Mandi Wasik on 10-07-24
By: Stassi Schroeder
Meaningful, difficult, funny
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Full circle journey
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A great unfiltered perspective of becoming a mother
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A real, honest account of new motherhood
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Amazing! 10/10
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Great book!
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Raw intimate thoughts that moms don’t talk about!
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The rawness and realness
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Messy, real, hilarious
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She seems awful but great read
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