My Wild and Sleepless Nights

As a guy with no children, motherhood has always intrigued me.

What does motherhood actually feel like? How does it change you? How to describe the bond between mother and child? I had questions that would be difficult to ask any mother. In this soaring memoir, Clover has answered them all for me. She has a skill to convert the most mundane into life-changing and the routine into extraordinary.

Clover’s style is engaging and intimate. She leaves no stone unturned in this ‘heart on her sleeve’ book about what it really means to be a mother.

Documenting a year of Clover Stroud’s fierce mother-love as her family expands with the arrival of her newborn son, this searing memoir veers far from the saccharin version of motherhood so often portrayed in fiction and on socials. 

That her five children span almost the entire breadth of childhood allows the reader a rare insight into what it means to mother simultaneously across a multitude of ages, from the visceral bond with the baby to the inevitable distance that comes with adolescence as older children begin to both rebel and repel.

Stroud’s intimate writing is as raw and euphoric as… show more.