My Wild and Sleepless Nights: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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And it details how Clover, the mother of five children aged from one to seventeen, has navigated motherhood across two decades, both losing and finding herself. As Stroud battles through pregnancy, labour, breastfeeding, and meetings with the school about Jimmy’s weed habit, her third and fourth children, Dash and Evangeline, wheel about in a world of spilled cornflakes and imaginary cats. 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. I almost stopped reading it early on for that reason, but am glad I persevered, and have just bought her first book (the second sounds too emotional for me! 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.

At the same time the book is in places hilariously funny and I laughed out loud many times, and at other times I felt tears coming as I read of her experiences and emotions.I strongly related to hearing how lonely being a mother can be whilst also feeling astronomical amounts of love for your child. For Stroud, there is no question of an epidural: labour is and needs to be an extreme experience, which takes her to the brink of life and death, and “feels to me like the very reason I was put on this planet”. She is currently living in Washington DC with her husband and the youngest three of her five children.

Stroud was shortlisted for the Wainwright prize for nature writing for her debut memoir, The Wild Other. 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. She has an amazing way with words, and she is right that many parenting books deal with pregnancy and the early years and don’t look at what happens after that, what you might honestly feel as a mum, and how extreme the highs and lows of parenting can be.Stroud has hit the nail on the head in describing what life can be like with children, and the quiet struggles we have to swallow as a mother, for the sake of keeping the train moving. It is a highly personal and brave book, a look right inside their life and what it is really like to be a mother of a big family. With raw honesty and very very very very good writing (as her eldest son Jimmy acknowledges) Stroud describes the extremes of motherhood in visceral detail. Although I’m over that now, I am wondering if, at the age of 49, I still have time to have another 3 children.