My Wild and Sleepless Nights: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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Stroud was incredibly raw, honest and emotional with the reader throughout her book where sometimes it was to the point of being uncomfortable. She doesn't shy away from any subject matter and just shares everything. I always appreciate honesty in a person and it made me love my time listening to Stroud reading her book to me (as I had the audiobook).

A compelling read. Clover writes so beautifully and somehow manages to give shape to the mess and madness of motherhood. Lucy AtkinsBrilliant - touching, tender, honest and so true. I don't think I've ever read anything like it. It captures that hopeless sense of how much you love your children and how powerless you feel as they grow up and away from you. * Eleanor Mills * Brilliant motherhood memoir...Clover Stroud is one of the very best writers on the light and dark of motherhood and, if you enjoyed her debut The Wild Other, you'll love this. The book follows the first year of her fifth child's life as she juggles looking after a newborn with dealing with her teenage son's problematic behaviour. The writing is sublime and honest. Good Housekeeping

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.' Alice O'Keeffe, The Guardian. Having grown up with three sisters, and later a step-brother and sister, I adored reading about the mayhem and madness so synonymous with big families, and was gripped by the nostalgia and fondness with which Clover so brilliantly writes about her ever-growing and changing family. Because to me she wasn’t Nell Gifford, she was my sister. A lot of people had a sense of what she was like, which had very little to do with what she was actually like, and how complex she was, and how her outward persona was different to her private life.”Brilliant – touching, tender, honest and so true. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like it. It captures that hopeless sense of how much you love your children and how powerless you feel as they grow up and away from you. Eleanor Mills We hear about Stroud's own complex relationship with motherhood, the challenges facing her other children, her relationship with her partner, her sex life, how she is trying to balance work and family plus so many more things. Beds have been made up with new fresh sheets and I have slept in them. I have dreamed of a life I wanted and then gone forward to create and live it. All this has happened in the everyday without me really noticing. But the moment before birth is quite different, as if it’s been crystallized: it’s the moment I can touch, when I can say, truly, yes, this life is happening to me right now. BEST NON-FICTION OF 2020: Clover Stroud charts the highs and lows of motherhood in all their deep, dark glory. Sarra Manning, RED Magazine

And yes they rebel, but that’s normal, certainly as normal as having sleepless nights when you have a baby or toddler tantrums. It doesn’t mean they don’t have values. I was given this book as a gift from a good mum friend of mine so I had no idea what to expect. I'd never heard of Clover Stroud and assumed this book would be like so many other parenting books that describe the funny and/or difficult bits of parenthood. However, as I started in on reading the book I was almost immediately taken in by Stroud's ability to describe everything so viscerally. She has this very raw, but relatable way of describing everything. Some of it I don't really recognise in my own like, but other bits feel like she's got inside my head and can read my darkest thoughts. I love how she isn't afraid to lay it all bare and admit she's making it up as she goes along, like so many of do.A beautifully written, brutally honest dissection of motherhood by a woman who has five children, from pregnancy to teenagers, covering both the extreme highs and lows. Stroud's writing examines what it is to be a woman with the same sensitive skill fans of her first memoir, The Wild Other, will recall. * Independent * Clover Stroud managed to write down all of the mania in one place, making me shed a tear and honk with laughter…she writes so eloquently about all we lose as well as gain through our children. Emma Barnett, Good Housekeeping I devoured it in one gollop. Clover's extreme honesty is a rare and lovely thing. A wonderful book. * Julie Myerson *

I wish I’d talked to Nell more about death and what she thought and felt about it, but by the time I brought it up it was too late, she was too close, she was looking at it right in the face. And she died with so much courage. We are conditioned to treat motherhood like some niche domestic craft or private medical condition, not fit or seemly to be discussed in front of others. But that is an act of cultural violence, which allows injustice to run riot through society and clog up our lives like weeds. The truth is that motherhood is what made you, me, the economy, politics, science, art, warfare and industry. And, as Stroud proves with her own unvarnished account, it can be an exhausting act of courage.

About My Wild and Sleepless Nights

But I’d liked to have asked how I’d know she was still there and where to find her, to find out where she has gone and what to do when I miss her, how to connect with her. I wish I knew the answers. As someone with a huge maternal instinct, passion for working with children and life long aim of being a mother, I find anything about motherhood to be really interesting. Stroud's book was definitely interesting but it was so much more than that. Beautiful, raw, touching and incredibly honest, My Wild and Sleepless Nights is a poetic and plain-spoken portrayal of the physical, emotional and psychological essence of mothering that will resonate with readers everywhere. About My Wild and Sleepless Nights Hotjar sets this cookie to identify a new user’s first session. It stores a true/false value, indicating whether it was the first time Hotjar saw this user. There is no arguing, however, with the sheer force of her writing. The reader is simply swept up in her painful, wonderful world. Buy it, read it, and enjoy it for the wild ride it is – but do think twice before you throw away the contraceptives.