Description

‘Raw, elemental and beautiful.’ Telegraph
‘This is quite simply the best book about motherhood I have ever read.’ – Eleanor Mills in the Sunday Times

Mother to five children, Clover Stroud has navigated family life across two decades, both losing and finding herself. In her touching, provocative and profoundly insightful book, she captures a sense of what motherhood really feels like – how intense, sensuous, joyful, boring, profound and dark it can be.

My Wild and Sleepless Nights examines what it means to be a mother, and reveals with unflinching honesty the many conflicting emotions that this entails: the joy and the wonder, the loneliness and despair.

MORE PRAISE FOR CLOVER STROUD:
‘Clover’s expertise is writing about family life in a way that feels both new and entirely familiar’ – Pandora Sykes
‘As tender, blazing, funny and unflinching as the love it describes. I want to give this triumphant book to every mother I know’ – Rachel Joyce
‘Stroud is always willing to rip open her very soul in order to reveal the truth about her life – and every time a woman tells the truth like this, it sets another woman free’ – Elizabeth Gilbert
‘I read in one greedy gulp and am still slightly reeling. Extraordinary writing… For mothers and those even vaguely interested in family dynamics it is fascinating’ – Alexandra Heminsley

Charting the course of one year, the first in her youngest child’s life, Clover searches for answers to questions that many of us would be too afraid to admit to – not only about motherhood, but also about female sexuality and identity. Her story will speak to all mothers, and anyone about to embark on that journey.

Publisher Review

This is quite simply the best book about motherhood I have ever read: touching, tender, honest and true. Even as she's bracingly direct about the frustrations of motherhood, Stroud also revels in the delights. Bliss and boredom coexist side by side - and the contradictions are at the core of it all. Stroud's book will give anyone heading out on this fearsome journey a lantern to guide the way. The book is not always pretty, and sometimes its directness is shocking, but it is full of love and honesty. * The Sunday Times * Clover Stroud's brilliantly unvarnished memoir finds the heroism and poetry in having kids ... Much of this book ..reads like a nature memoir, full of landscape both external and internal ... How brilliant for someone to write about the blankness as well as the beauty. -- Nell Frizzell * Telegraph * What does being a mother really feel like? Clover Stroud's powerhouse of a memoir gets closer than anything else I have read to answering that question. The motherhood she describes is the very antithesis of the sanitised, smiling vision we are sold in washing powder ads... She excels in evoking the feral, instinctive forces that motherhood unleashes... This is a vision of motherhood for the (now middle-aged) MDMA generation... The reader is simply swept up in her painful, wonderful world. Buy it, read it, and enjoy it for the wild ride it is. * The Guardian * The best evocation of the all-consuming, self-eroding reality of motherhood, while also being luminous with love. * The Sunday Times * A wonderfully frank, often very funny account of bringing up five children with very different needs. * Independent: BEST BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS *