SLEEPER HITS

The latest BookTok success story isn’t romantasy, monster smut, or the long-awaited Onyx Storm, but a 180-page novel translated from French that was barely read when it first appeared in 1995. Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men is narrated by a girl who’s been raised in captivity with 39 other women in a cage underground, where they’re constantly monitored by a group of male guards. They have no memory of how they got there. When the women miraculously escape, they find a grassy plain denuded of all life, on a planet that might not even be Earth. As the tribe forges their own meager civilization, the narrator slowly reconciles herself to the fact that, as the youngest among them, she will be the last of her cohort to survive. Possibly — she has no way of knowing for sure — her death will mean the end of all humanity. Booksellers can barely keep the book in stock. 

On TikTok, where it’s been posted about countless times, I Who Have Never Known Men is almost invariably described as “a book that will change your life.” It’s been picked up by Dua Lipa’s Service95 and just about every other person who pops up in my little corner of X. The book has more than 138,000 ratings on Goodreads, with an average of four stars, while many literary novels are lucky to eke out three. Transit Press, the book’s small nonprofit publisher in the U.S., sold 100,000 copies last year. 

Jack Kyono, who manages McNally Jackson’s Prince Street location in New York, says the store’s employees got so many requests for I Who Have Never Known Men that it moved from Dutch and Belgian Literature in Translation (“an unjustly undershopped section”) to Customer Favorites. He attributes the book’s success not just to BookTok but to the rising popularity of dystopian fiction and fiction by women in translation, which has gained traction since the blogger Meytal Radzinski called for a Women in Translation month back in 2014. 

There are tons of “women in translation” roundups on TikTok that include the book. @Bigbooklady recommended it to her 318,000 followers in honor of Women in Translation Month in August 2023. But it’s not just book nerds: Another TikToker interrupted her usual hairstyling content to post an effusive review. “If I had to summarize this book, I’d say it’s so fucked-up but so beautiful,” she said. “If you want to rethink your entire life and find a newfound appreciation for living, I recommend.” 

Not to paint with too broad a brush here, but I was initially surprised that the BookTok girlies had taken up an obscure literary title, since their tastes tend to run more to romance, romantasy, and generic women’s fiction. But maybe the BookTokers, like me, were drawn in by this thought experiment: How, the book asks, would one make sense of existence if concepts like time, written language, and the bonds of friendship and family all had to be learned in a vacuum, slowly, over the course of a mostly solitary lifetime? Reading I Who Have Never Known Men forces the reader to contemplate what an immense privilege it is to be able to read books at all, not to mention eat food that doesn't come from cans.

ADVERTISER CONTENT

CUT CHAT

Tom Sachs and Sarah Hoover at her book launch.     Photo: Hunter Abrams/BFA.com/Shutterstock

The Motherload, a new memoir by Sarah Hoover — the art consultant and influencer who’s married to the artist Tom Sachs — promises an unvarnished look at her first year of motherhood. It begins with a druggy party she hosted at the Chateau Marmont to celebrate the first birthday of her son, who’s cared for by their 24/7 live-in nanny. So far, so relatable (or not). But what follows somehow manages to be, at times, a terrifying and sympathy-provoking account of the mental-health crisis Hoover experienced following her son’s traumatic birth. In spite of the material abundance of her life — in a Soho loft full of designer clothing and bespoke furnishings — she felt completely alienated from her child, to the point where it was painful to be in the same room with him. The book made me wonder: If someone with all Hoover’s advantages can suffer a traumatic birth and life-threatening postpartum depression, what hope is there for … everyone else? 

Unsurprisingly, The Motherload seems to have touched a nerve among readers, not least the readers in this office. I asked Erica Schwiegershausen, who recently reviewed the book for the Cut, and Curbed’s Adriane Quinlan, who reported on Tom Sachs’s scary art factory back in 2023, to share their thoughts with me. 

Emily: We've talked a lot about how one irritating thing about this book is Hoover’s insistence that nobody told her about the horrors of motherhood. But was there anything that you read about that you thought, Oh, there's actually no way that she could have been prepared for this specifically? 

Adriane: I really do think that the biggest blinder here that's keeping her from information is  privilege. She has sort of an innate trust of doctors and health services because she could afford to go to the nicest, fanciest ones and never had to do her own research. She also chose not to take a birthing class. 

But at the same time, I didn’t know from either the reading or my birthing class that tearing the amniotic sac would even register in a woman's body, and that's Hoover’s traumatic pain incident. After reading this, I don't think anyone is going to forget to be wary of the doctor who's going to tear your sac.

Emily: Not getting consent to do a really invasive procedure is considered medical rape, and it isn't something that I've read about a lot, and I feel relatively well versed in birth literature. I also felt like I've read a lot of accounts of postpartum depression and anxiety, including postpartum psychosis, and I had never read anything that included the manic highs, the “dressing up in a little bikini and doing lots of drugs” aspect of things.

Erica: I mean, because I had postpartum psychosis, I totally relate to the rage she describes. I remember feeling rage in my stomach, this sort of physical experience of rage in the days after my daughter was born that, as she describes, was extremely outsize but wasn't completely disconnected from the reality of the experience.

Emily: Motherhood is this enormous identity shift, and if you've done zero to prepare for it, it is going to knock you on your ass. If you have this whole adult life and professional identity and then all of a sudden, your job is to take care of another human being's life, then that's going to be traumatic in and of itself apart from having a traumatic birth. 

Adriane: I disagree. Many women see the Edinburgh Depression Scale handed to them at doctor’s appointments as a little red flag that says you should watch for these feelings. Hoover says in the book she felt like the symptoms described in that survey didn’t apply to her. To be surprised that it happened to her seemed to me to fit the personality of a privileged person. "The bad things that happen to other people don't happen to me, so I don't have to follow advice or take a birth in class or try to breastfeed or whatever. It's not going to apply to me."

Emily: There's a sense of her own exceptionalism that makes the genuinely bad things that happened to her that she had no control over harder to sympathize with.

Erica: I did not relate to her lack of curiosity about motherhood. I wanted to read everything that I possibly could. I did wonder, giving her the benefit of the doubt, whether that was a way to cope with her anxiety, by blocking it all out beforehand.

Adriane: I did relate to that. I didn't want to read about giving birth until two weeks before, and I was ready to read about all the things that would happen after from the very beginning, but delivery was scary for me, so I avoided information, so that kind of helps me understand her.

Emily: Do you think that in some ways her enormous privilege actually exacerbated the duration and severity of her depression?

Erica: I do not want to insinuate that spending more time with her baby would cure her depression because obviously I don't believe that. Spending time with my baby was not what cured me at all — getting child care was what made me feel better. As she writes, she needed medication and needed therapy. 

On the other hand, she's just able to totally avoid being with her baby. It made me feel like, Wow, I'm so glad I didn't even have that option. Whatever kind of mental-health crisis I was experiencing, I did enjoy my daughter. A few weeks after I had my first daughter, I read Michael Lewis's dad memoir because someone had given it to my husband. I actually kind of liked it, and he had this bit in it where it was like, "The love you feel for your baby can't be separated from taking care of them. It’s through taking care of them that you feel that love.” I didn't feel hostility towards my baby the way that Hoover describes, but there was something about being like, “the care is the love” that was very helpful to me. 

Adriane: She spends a lot of page space worrying about whether she's a good mother, and I agree with you that I feel like that thought goes away for me when I'm frustrated that we're late again and I'm pulling on my son's clothing as fast as I can, and then I have this little moment of feeling present, like, I realize you are a real human. I'm your mom, and I'm going to put them on as gently as possible right now. I'm so sorry I was trying to snap that underwear on. That’s what love is: gently pulling up pants even though I'm 17 minutes late.

Emily: I think what was interesting to me was just the thought experiment of, what would motherhood be like if you felt absolutely no connection to your child, and actually being around your child made you feel really anxious and terrible? Because that was so different from my experience. And I feel like she was only able to have and to maintain that experience because she had 24/7 live-in child care. 

Erica: I still am completely baffled given that she has the nanny, she has her husband, she has her mom, she has these friends, she has a therapist. Where the hell were all these people for a year while she was suffering? Why didn’t they notice? I don't know.

Adriane: I have an answer to Emily's actual question, then. Privilege wasn’t fully what contributed to this problem, but I think being an influencer was. Because she was determined to keep up appearances with her therapist, determined to maintain her relationship with her husband despite all of these things she wanted to tell him about or was angry about him about. 

Emily: Let's talk about Tom. Adriane, you're an expert on Tom. In terms of the character of Tom as portrayed in this book — well, what are we to make of him? Is he meant to be read as the villain of the book? He certainly seems to have made some extremely bad choices. 

Adriane: It feels like a crisis PR firm saw the article that we wrote about Tom and was like, Sarah, you've got to have some sort of explanation for why you're married to this guy, and this book is a weird response to that. I think Erica wrote really well and clearly in her review about how there were red flags from the beginning about these behaviors that just showed he wouldn't be a very thoughtful father. 

Emily: What stood out to you?

Adriane: I find it very incomprehensible that someone who could be able to afford their own parental leave chooses instead the night that they come back from the hospital to go to work. And we see him going to work throughout his son's newborn phase. 

Erica: She's right to be furious at him. His life doesn't change at all.

Adriane: And he messages her to say, “Why don't you bring down some dinner to my workplace” when she's, what, two weeks postpartum? I remember barely walking at that point in postpartum, and I'd had an easyish delivery. The idea of him making her come to him and keep his life normal is frankly disgusting to me.

Erica: And the fact that afterwards, he sort of tries to be like, “Oh, I had no idea you were depressed. I thought you were just angry at me again for a year.” I was also in a bad mental state and very angry at my husband after my baby was born, but I am so grateful that he cared enough to think beyond his ego and actually noticed that something horrible was happening with me. The fact that her own husband is so clueless is pretty damning.

Emily: It's like he didn't know her at all as a human and so was unable to recognize when she was not herself. It was just really sad. It's so weird to me that one of the blurbs for this book says that it's brutally funny because it's just like, was there anything funny in this book?

Erica: When I was going back trying to read it more generously, and I reread the early section of them dating, she's actually quite honest about how sort of compromising this relationship was for her from the beginning, which I felt like was sort of rare to read, and I was kind of impressed that she was that vulnerable.

Emily: I'm totally impressed by her vulnerability and honesty. I feel like she's honest to the extent that she's capable of being honest with herself, which is maybe not as honest with oneself as one would ideally want from a memoirist.

Adriane: I would've preferred to read a behind-the-scenes at Gagosian Gallery or “Why I divorced my monster art husband” or “My five years enjoying the richest of the rich things in New York City.” There's zero interrogation, as Erica pointed out in her review, about her lifestyle to the point that you'll be hearing all about her depression, but you'll also know what she was wearing in that moment. 

But back to Tom, I wanted to say his reputation as an artist is for an exacting level of detail that appears to be homemade, and the labor for that making was coming from a troop of underpaid and manipulated art assistants. Many of them thought they would have a career in art, and so they would just survive working for him, and some of them quit because of what they described as abuse, being called names in the office, having to see him naked, photos of naked women lying on the tables. A room in the office was called the “rape room.” [Editor’s note: Sachs denied many of the allegations reported by New York.]

The sort of labor practice of his art-making, the handmade nature of it coming from all these invisible workers — I think that does fit what we see in this book, in that this is a book about motherhood where you learn that they had 24-hour care for their child, and we only hear what Hoover wants to share about that nanny. And I would rather read the nanny's book. If their nanny wants to speak to me anonymously, find me.

Emily: What do you wish for her? I mean, a divorce, obviously.

Adriane: I wish for her to volunteer at the migrant intake center in New York City and see the mothers with the babies strapped to them.

Emily: I would like to see a follow-up to this book in seven to ten years because, just speaking as someone who is out of this phase of motherhood now, my kids are 6 and 9, we have a totally different set of problems. I would be really curious as to how this family deals with that different set of problems because I think they become much more difficult to outsource when your children are sentient creatures who can analyze the position they're in and start to rebel against you.

BESTSELLERS

Anticipation could not have run higher for Onyx Storm, the third book in Rebecca Yarros’s “Empyrean” series, which was released on January 21. Customers made a run on the “deluxe” print edition of the book, leaving shelves bare at Target even though the initial print run was 2 million copies. In part this was because readers had been waiting for a new installment in the series since November 2023, which feels like a lifetime ago. That’s also long enough for readers — okay, me — to have forgotten some of the important lore and world-building of Basgiath War College, where heroine Violet Sorrengail and her fellow cadets spend the first two books preparing themselves and the dragons they’re psychically bonded to for a war that, in Onyx Storm, is now upon them. 

But the new book hasn’t quite lived up to its hype for everyone. The “Empyrean” series was originally intended to be a trilogy, but after its initial success, the publisher announced it would actually be a five-book series. That’s why Goodreads reviewer Clace called Onyx Storm a “filler novel.” “There were so many new plotlines opened without actually closing the previous ones, and instead of doing that, they were dragged along. There was a lot of traveling in this book, and some of the scenes could have been chopped up; there was no substance provided by them,” they wrote. Seven chapters in, I was tempted to agree. So many new characters and political rivalries were introduced so quickly, and there was hardly any spicy action between Violet and her fated mate, Xaden Riorson (yes, that’s really his name), because he’s been infected by venin (an evil thing kind of like an STD that makes your eyes turn red and makes your powers uncontrollable to the extent that you might inadvertently kill the person you’re trying to have hot, magic-powers-tinged sex with). I also missed the structure of the “school” aspect of things. I was reminded of the final Harry Potter book, where they’re just fighting Voldemort and you don’t get all the fun stuff, like high jinks in class or the magical Christmas feast. 

Others felt similarly. “I have no idea what’s going on,” editor-at-large Choire Sicha told me. “Maybe I’ll read the Wikipedia page for book two again.” Features writer Kathryn VanArendonk just can’t get past Yarros’s repetitive, boring writing style, though she’s read the whole series thus far. “Lord knows I’ve read and enjoyed lots of other books in this genre with similarly thin (and yet simultaneously overcomplicated) building blocks. But the thing about Onyx Storm that I can’t really get over is the prose.” According to VanArendonk, it’s even worse than in her first two books. 

But my colleague Margaret Hartmann recommends sticking with it, since (spoiler alert!!) the spice we crave returns later in the book. “Yarros does a great job of maintaining the romantic tension,” she says. “Xaden and Violet are together the whole time, but she thinks up lots of amusing predicaments that should keep them from banging ... but, of course, they find a way.” And in the end, that’s really all that matters.

ADVERTISER CONTENT

 Do you have gossip or things you want to see here? Let me know at bookgossip@nymag.com.