Sarah Hoover’s bestselling memoir The Motherload: Episodes From the Brink of Motherhood is in development as a drama series at 20th Television, sources tell Variety.
Stuart Zicherman is attached as the showrunner, and Hoover will co-write the pilot with Sas Goldberg (“Only Murders in the Building,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”).
“The Motherload” series will follow Jennifer, a millennial art dealer who finds motherhood to be nothing what she expected. “Instead of joy, it is turning out to be months of rage, brain fog, self medication, and a scorched earth policy towards her husband,” per the logline. “A total surrender of sex, career and identity results, and Jennifer realizes she’ll never be able to find her way to fulfillment 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 bullshit mommy narratives.”
Hoover’s source material is a childrearing memoir that explores the horrors of motherhood. The book flips the euphoric narrative of giving birth on its head and “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,” according to the publisher’s description.
Hoover is an author and cultural critic who moved from Indiana to New York to study art history. She worked in a gallery and married the artist Tom Sachs, “but when Hoover got pregnant, everything in her life began to unravel,” per the synopsis. “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.” Her memoir is a rejection of the idea that mothers are pure and perfect, and an unflinchingly honest examination of postpartum depression.
Zicherman is also an executive producer on “The Motherload” alongside The Gotham Group’s Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and Jeremy Bell and Sas Goldberg. Both the Gotham Group and Goldberg have first-look deals with 20th.
Hoover is represented by WME, Linden Entertainment, Align PR and Jackoway Austen. Zicherman is represented by UTA and Mosaic. Goldberg is represented by WME, Rise Management and Ziffren Brittenham. The Gotham Group is represented by WME.
