MY WILD AND SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

A MOTHER’S STORY

CLOVER STROUD

Doubleday, 256pp, £16.99

Clover Stroud’s first memoir, The

Wild Other, described years of adventuring after her idyllic childhood ended when she was 16 after her mother suffered a horrific riding accident. It was short-listed for the Wainwright prize for naturewriting. The second is set in the Oxfordshire countryside and describes the first year in the life of her fifth child, and some difficulties with her eldest son, now 16. Alice O’keefe in the Guardian hailed it as another sort of nature-writing – ‘but this is nature as experienced from the inside. [Stroud]... excels in evoking the feral, instinctive forces that motherhood unleashes.’

Stroud writes of how motherhood forces her to pretend ‘to be the person I really am not: patient, hygienic, gentle, interested in other people’s children, good at craft, moderate, rarely anxious’ and contrasts this to her sexual self ‘when I can forget all that and be something different, unembarrassed and lustful’. But while ‘sex is the opposite of motherhood’ she compares her labour pains for the birth of her fifth child to sex, and describes the ‘pure liquid heaven’ of the hormones coursing through her, which she likens to heroin. O’keefe described it as ‘a vision of motherhood for the (now middle-aged) MDMA generation’. Eleanor Mills in the

Sunday Times praised it as ‘quite simply the best book about motherhood I have ever read’ while Julia Bueno in the Times Literary

Supplement noted that this was a ‘far from a Cuskian account of the darker emotions our children can pull us towards… The vocation of motherhood clearly wins out for her.’