My Wild and Sleepless Nights: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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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”.

It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. Clover Stroud’s powerhouse of a memoir gets closer than anything else I have read to answering that question. It’s as if Stroud has reached into my head, lived my life for the last seven years and put it all down on paper into the most tender yet brutal memoir. Clover Stroud brought back so many memories, the good ones, and the bad ones, the happiness and joy as well as the fear and guilt you feel as a mother.This is really a very different book from the usual ‘motherhood is hard, but worth it’ theme, but Wild and Sleepless is a genre in its own right. Almost uncomfortably honest at times, Clover doesn’t hesitate to share the darkest and brightest moments, the impact on one’s self, one’s relationships, and one’s heart that birthing to let go can bring, and the deep heartbreaking joy that a love like no other allows those of us who are privileged to bear it. I don’t think it added to the book, it wasn’t what I was reading the book for, and I felt it would be fairly awful for her kids when one day they and their friends read it.

Her own mother was brain damaged in a horrific riding accident when Stroud was 16: “Much of my life has been about seeking strong motion both to make me feel alive and distract from the pain of existence. Sometimes I think that a lot of parenthood is like that morning, trying to create an impression that you know what you are doing and are in control. My Wild and Sleepless Nights explores what it means to be a mother: the way that children and motherhood changes women - both strengthening and weakening a woman's sense of identity.There is so much precedent set when you become a parent and although we try not to, we do adhere to the social norms and suffer in silence. So much spoke to my heart, it made me laugh out loud nod and agree out loud and possibly cry a little, quietly and with a mixture of joy and sadness. It’s not about duty, or even about juggling the demands of kids and work; mothering for Stroud has more to do with hedonism and adventure, about escape, and exploring the outer limits of human experience. A bit of a timely read for me and it has renewed my sense of worth as not only a mother, but as a woman. The discord between relationship with self and relationships as mother which I'm still growing into.

When someone gives her new baby a stuffed toy monkey, she longs to surround him with more ancient and serious things: the Bible, The Complete Works of Shakespeare. A parent of five children aged one to seventeen, Stroud has plenty of wisdom and insight to offer women at all stages of their journey through parenting, and this beautiful, refreshingly honest account of all aspects of motherhood is required reading on a provocative topic. She has a live in nanny and was able to just go off in a weekend away with her husband to rejuvenate her marriage. This is quite simply the best book about motherhood I have ever read: touching, tender, honest and true.After all, where’s the fun in providing boring old steadfast support when you could be out there getting buzzed on oxytocin? Reading this book is like listening to a friend who describes your own feelings, doubts and frustrations. Raw, honest memoir exploring the authors experience of motherhood and mothering five children including a baby and a teenager all at once. 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. She excels in evoking the feral, instinctive forces that motherhood unleashes, which can be so difficult to explain or describe (hence the shocked refrain of new mothers: “Nobody ever tells you!