As Stroud writes, while some women complain that there is a silence around the pain of labour, there’s another silence, just as loud, “around the squashed feeling of despair that can come with cooking supper which will get thrown into the bin untouched, night after night”. Into that silence, Stroud allows herself to speak of all the physical, sexual and emotional mess that having a family, creating babies, brings. Yes, it is an experience that is in her case white, female, middle-class and rooted in southern England. But in its detail it is also universal. “When I lie him down to change him, I see myself reflected in his eyeballs,” she writes of one long summer afternoon when her son is still a few months old. We can all be that reflection. It is an image that is both incredibly familiar – I have changed a lot of nappies – and yet revelatory. I have never thought of it that way.

My Wild and Sleepless Nights is not just about babies either, it’s about motherhood all the way up, her oldest child Jimmy having now finished university. 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 *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. 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). Amidst all of this, Clover is also grieving deeply for the loss of her beloved sister Nell Gifford, the founder of Giffords Circus. The ecstasies, the agonies, the passion and the pain. Reading Clover Stroud is a whole body experience. Polly Samson

What a beautiful writer Clover Stroud is! This honest look at the high and lows of the roller coaster that is maternal life and love is both joyous and exhilarating. Cathy RentzenbrinkWhat 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 * 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.

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 devoured it in one gollop. Clover's extreme honesty is a rare and lovely thing. A wonderful book. * Julie Myerson * Which does beg the question about her own large family. “I think it’s my endless desire to take my life to the edge and to feel everything, to take things to an extreme and to fill my plate as high as possible. But I’m also aware as I deal with it that having children is the best and worse thing that can happen to you, and that I’m going to miss it when it’s over.

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. 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 * As a motivation for creating new humans, this is not without its ethical problems. Stroud briskly shrugs people off when they question the practicality of having a fifth baby (“I want messy”), and cheerfully admits that in many ways another child is the last thing they all need. But the imperative of obliterating her own inner pain is more urgent to her than the imperative of giving time and attention to the children she already has. After all, where’s the fun in providing boring old steadfast support when you could be out there getting buzzed on oxytocin? When they grow up and write their own books, perhaps her children will tell us how her messiness felt to them. So yes it’s about the squitchy, squidgy yumminess but also about the bone crushing exhaustion and repetition. Because I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t struggle with motherhood in some way however they portray themselves.

My Wild and Sleepless Nights is part memoir of a year in the life of a mother of five and part exploration of the push and pull of motherhood. At forty-one, Clover Stroud finds herself pregnant with her fifth child, Lester, and the book takes place over his first year. At the same time, her oldest son, Jimmy, is a teenager who tests boundaries and questions the confines of life with a big, messy family in the middle of the British countryside. While Lester pulls her into his newborn world, Jimmy is pushing himself away from his mother. Along the way, Stroud seeks to answer the question: what does motherhood feel like? She is not trying to answer this question for all mothers, though she does include conversations she’s had with friends throughout the book. Rather, My Wild and Sleepless Nights is a deeply personal exploration of the feelings that motherhood inspires, both the highs and the lows. As Stroud puts it: “Nothing makes me as angry as motherhood does; nothing makes me as happy.” I have been waiting for a book like this for a long time. Stroud captures the very essence of motherhood in all its contradictions - the brutal loveliness of what it is to mother another, and how the act of doing so breaks us open in ways both wonderful and terrible. There are few other books about motherhood as brave, honest and beautifully written as this one. Sarah Langford, author of In Your Defence 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. Has writing it down helped? “I haven’t found it cathartic actually. I thought it would be quite therapeutic but in writing it down I have to recreate it in my head so it’s been quite a painful process and does have an immediate rawness to it.”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 Stroud’s clear-eyed look at how wildness and domesticity have entwined in her life is both heartening and inspiring. Olivia Laing 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 * She’s just got them all off to work, school and preschool respectively, and her kitchen is littered with the detritus of their departure. “This how I like it though. Neatness has its own pressures,” which is such a Clover thing to say. 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