My Wild and Sleepless Nights: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

Product Information

Upon expecting my second baby I enjoyed reading this nothing held back, honest opinions on motherhood you often don't hear.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend it to anyone else who loves reading about motherhood or who is already mother and wants to read about someone else's journey! I loved reading about Clovers youngest children which took me back to the days of raising small children and readily related to the madness of teenager life and the sadness that they leave you, as they should. The fact that the mother in the book and I have had a shared experience of raising children (in a way that I have rarely seen depicted in other books) was the main thing that kept me reading until the end. So I was somewhat nervous of reading the intensity of motherhood in this memoir: would I be further swayed one way or the other? And the love you have for your children can be a stressful, violent kind of love and I wish that was talked about more.Clover describes the bliss of being a new mother and the complete immersion you have whilst parenting young children through to navigating the way your relationship changes once your children grow through their teen years, ready to leave the nest.

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. I really liked the writing style but think it was spoilt a bit by the unnecessary sexual references. 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”. 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.After all, where’s the fun in providing boring old steadfast support when you could be out there getting buzzed on oxytocin? We get a remarkable 360-degree view of many different stages of mothering, all happening at once: she lives through the passionate intensity of her first attachment with Lester, just as her eldest son, 16-year-old Jimmy, is in the process of separation, his adolescence “compelling us further and further apart, once magnets, now repelled”.