While We're All Losing It Over ACOTAR 6, Sarah J. Maas' 'Traumatic' Confession Shouldn't Be Overlooked
Everyone is talking about Sarah J. Maas’s March 4 appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast, where she announced ACOTAR books 6 and 7 will be released soon (!!) after five long years since A Court of Thorns and Roses came out. But one of the most powerful parts in the interview came not from talking about her best-selling novels, but from Maas getting vulnerable about her “traumatic” journey to motherhood.
Host Alex Cooper opened up about the online discourse surrounding Feyre’s pregnancy in A Court of Silver Flames. “I think a lot of people were frustrated, right, that she didn’t have control or understanding of what was happening to her body,” Cooper said, asking Maas why she chose to write her story that way.
“I love my children,” Maas said. “I am f—ing obsessed with my kids. I hated being pregnant. I hated it. It was traumatic for me, every step of the way.”
When she gave birth to her firstborn son, Taran, in 2018, it was difficult. Maas had an emergency C-section two weeks after her due date. Her son was “in distress” because he had not “dropped” into the birth canal. “It was the kind of thing where I sometimes think about this. Like, if I had been born a hundred years before, I would have died,” she said. “And so that really stuck with me, this sense of like, I should be dead, and my son should be dead from this.”
Her struggles started even before the birth, when an “a—hole nurse” told Maas that she was “only” supposed to gain a certain amount of weight during pregnancy. She said this was especially triggering to her as “someone who has a history with disordered eating.”
“It took every bit of joy away. Instead of focusing on this beautiful, beautiful baby growing inside of me, I was thinking about the food I was putting into my body,” she explained.
When Maas was two weeks past her due date, her doctor scheduled her to be induced and advised her to eat a big meal before checking into the hospital to help her prepare for labor. However, when she arrived, the doctor on call determined that she needed an emergency C-section instead.
“The doctor who was there is a man, and he starts yelling at me, saying, ‘Why would you eat anything? You can’t eat anything!’” Maas recalled. “And I was like, ‘Your colleague literally told me to go have a big dinner and come here. I did not know I was having an emergency C-section.’”
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She was “terrified” in the situation, which wasn’t helped by someone “scolding” her right before, and the hospital not allowing her husband in the operating room. “I’m like in the operating room, sitting on a table, waiting for this massive needle [for the epidural], and I’m shaking so violently with terror, and all the doctors ignored me.”
A med school intern held her hand through it, “and that meant so much to me,” she said.
Afterward, she struggled with the recovery from the C-section.
“The recovery from the c-section was horrible, he sliced me way too high, he was lazy,” she shared, adding that it “essentially destroyed the flow and look of my stomach to where it would never heal right.” She said it took her “a while” to even want another baby before her daughter, Sloane, was born in 2022, “because what I went through and the recovery from the c-section was so bad, it was not fun for me.”
“The fear, the trauma, all of that. Writing that book allowed me to get it out of my system in a way and process it,” Maas added.
Maas also talked about how powerful motherhood is.
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“Motherhood is a thing that so many women experience, for better or worse, and it was something that I wanted to write about. … Motherhood doesn’t need to be glossed over; it doesn’t need to be something that is seen as weak,” Maas explained. “Someone being in a loving relationship with a person and choosing to bring a new life into this world and to share their world and open their hearts to someone, that’s a beautiful thing. However, you make a family, that is a beautiful, wonderful thing, and it is not a weakness. And I have become a stronger person because I’m a mother. I learned how to stand up for myself, becoming a mom more than I ever did before I had kids.”
In the comments, people were really empathizing with Maas’s story. “I was really not a fan of Feyre’s pregnancy storyline, but this interview certainly made me view it in a different light,” one person wrote.
Someone else agreed, adding, “Her context truly changed my perception of this storyline.”
“Sarah sharing her traumatic birth story was so unexpected,” another wrote. “It was so relatable and real. Love her even more for that.”
Hearing her get vulnerable about the emotions, experiences, and struggles she went through in her journey to motherhood is inspiring. Now, we have just enough time to re-read the books with this perspective in mind before the next installment drops in Oct. 2026!
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