Snapshot of loss
Clover Stroud’s account of her grief after the death of her sister is raw and unflinching, writes Rebecca Armstrong
Acouple of years before her sister Nell died from breast cancer at the age of 46, Clover Stroud was at a party. Another guest was asking about her family. Did she work with her sister? “No,” replied Stroud. “I am the one without the circus, the one with all the children who writes about the way life feels.”
Nell was the founder of the vintagestyle Giffords Circus, while Stroud is a journalist and the author of the startlingly honest memoirs The Wild Other and My Wild and Sleepless Nights. The Red of My Blood, another breathtaking deep dive into her world, is her third book and, while very much about how life feels, it is also an exploration of death, a tribute to Nell and a howl of love and rage. It is an elegy of outstanding beauty to an extraordinary woman, written by her equally idiosyncratic younger sister.
When Stroud writes that she “took a photo of [Nell] when she was dead and I look at it sometimes if I am feeling entirely strong or exceptionally reckless and I can tell you, she was golden. She was like a god”, it captures so much – the agony of grief, her inability to look away, the self-knowledge of her own incaution. “I’d felt extremely weird taking that photo,” Stroud goes on, but she is happy she did.
In this and myriad other ways she takes aim at conventional approaches to bereavement, seeking instead to understand Nell’s death, and the preposterous idea that life will carry on without her.
She is tartly sardonic on the popular anthropomorphic avatars of our dead. “It seems to me that we invest robins and butterflies with an almost solemn and hugely overloaded responsibility to be the people we love. There are a LOT of people flying around in robins.”
But she also seeks signs of Nell everywhere, combining the mundanity of family life (packed lunches, cat food) with magical thinking as she looks to the knights from her children’s books to help in her quest of understanding. Sex, rollup cigarettes, old text messages and metaphysical poetry are equally valid ways she makes sense of her loss.
While The Red of My Blood is deeply personal, it also plays out against the backdrop of the pandemic – Nell died in December 2019. At first, Stroud is isolated in her grief, then Covid makes commonplace something precious but painful. “I felt a bit affronted, as if a lot of people had suddenly moved into a front room I had been quietly sitting in on my own.”
She is very good on her rage against platitude-spouting friends and strangers as well as the seemingly incomprehensible people she encounters who have not experienced trauma or loss.
This is a book that draws in its readers and speaks to them. There are typographic flourishes – huge type, different fonts – that feel like an attempt to communicate in any way possible Stroud’s new way of being, and ultimately, she moves towards a