100 books like My Wild and Sleepless Nights

I identified with Tara Westover while reading her memoir because of her secluded and restrictive upbringing. Like her, my upbringing made me feel left out, “other,” different from normal kids, not allowed the usual activities that other kids could do and kept from learning and growing in my own way.

I didn’t understand how these rules affected me until I saw my angst in her own words of isolation, yearning, and rebellion. It gave me hope that our desire for self-fulfillment and actualization is universal and stronger than the people who try, for good reasons or bad, to keep us down.

It is an amazing book. I could barely put it down. 

Any book set in suburban life with a dark underbelly has me hooked.

I loved the themes of privilege, race, and motherhood within the context of suburban life. I also enjoyed the contrast between such different ways to parent: a wealthy and seemingly perfect family compared to a nomadic and unconventional mother-daughter duo.

I think the story also raised some interesting questions about the intricacies of motherhood and, of course, how we always feel the weight of the choices we make as mothers and the impact of those choices on our lives and the lives of our children. Not to mention, what a great title!

Raynor and her husband, Moth, are destitute. Moth has been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. They have lost everything; house, work, and income. They have nowhere to go.

So they decide to go for a walk; a very long walk; around the coastline of the West Country following the South Coastal Path. Raynor shares with us, in poetic detail, the minutiae of their struggle, both physical and emotional. As they battle with the force of nature’s elements, something starts to happen.

They begin to identify a way forward and Moth begins to feel stronger. This true story will inspire you. It is a pure testament to the healing power of nature. Raynor’s humility shines through in what is, essentially, a love letter to Moth; the truest love of her life.

A shooter in a zoo might not sound like the premise for an exploration of motherhood, but this brilliantly paced thriller is just that. On a day trip to the zoo with her four-year-old son, Joan must flee from a gunman, a task made all the more complicated by having to simultaneously negotiate the quotidian questions and tasks of parenting.

A hungry child, or one who needs the toilet, can be challenging at the best of times, let alone while hiding in an empty animal enclosure trying to avoid imminent death! Ultimately, the primary role of any parent is to keep their child alive. Fierce Kingdom puts this ordinary occupation in extraordinary circumstances, and the result is utterly compelling. 

It was McNish’s poem Embarrassed – a reflection on society’s inability to cope with a mother breastfeeding her child in public – that first led me to her work. I shared it with everyone. 

Part diary, part poetry collection, Nobody Told Me is born of the same honesty and documents her experience from the moment she discovered she was pregnant at Glastonbury and through the first two years of her daughter’s life. 

There’s an immediacy that comes with the pieces being offered exactly how they were written, whether that was “at four AM, some on the loo...[or] at work”. Motherhood, especially early motherhood, has little time for polishing (of furniture or of words), and this lack of editing is, I think, what allows me to see myself reflected in the poems.

As Spilt Milk’s protagonist Bea Straw is a mum-blogger, I was keen to read experiences of real-life “mummy influencers”. Braithwaite’s book – part memoir, part manifesto – was of particular interest because she is Black, somewhat of a rarity in the picture of motherhood painted by social media that tends to be both very white and very middle class. 

Documenting the difficult birth of her daughter and the subsequent mishandled complications, Braithwaite exposes the many and varied ways in which women of colour are disadvantaged and endangered by racial bias. 

While light in tone, there’s a power and vulnerability in Braithwaite’s writing, and I learnt so much from this brilliant book.

Suicide is a grisly subject; even taboo in many cultures.

Rather than skirting around the issue, Niven tackles it in a head on collision of brotherly love. His account of drug abuse and his ‘wee’ brother’s life that slipped through everyone’s fingers is as mesmerizing as it is difficult to read. Niven’s raw honesty disarms the reader as Niven´s prose brings the deepest of human torment into stark focus.

I recommend reading this book that unearths deep truths about family, commitment, suffering, and love.

William and his wife lost their baby in its last term and had to endure the torment of an induced stillbirth.

The same thing happened to a dear friend years ago so when I heard William as embarking on this brave endeavour to write about it, I was intrigued. The publisher, Little Toller Books, decided to create a space for William’s male voice in a publishing genre that is dominated by women’s.

The result is a heart-wrenching tale of grief as William clamours to contextualise the world he has been thrown into. William’s skill as a writer lies in his depiction of the indescribable. I’m sure there were months of soul searching and pen holding before he finally hit upon a way of converting his pain into the stunning prose. I am so grateful he did. And you will be too.

Deciding to place a child for adoption is one of the most excruciating decisions in the human experience. When Amy Seek, a promising architecture student, becomes pregnant, she’s not yet ready to become a parent. But she’s also not ready, completely, to hand over her child to a perfectly lovely family. Her tale of love, heartbreak, and acceptance is a reminder to parents and non-parents of all circumstances that there are lots of ways to make a family—and in this case, it was the best, most perfectly imperfect option. I think this is a really important book for everyone in the adoption triad (birth parents, adoptive parents, adoptees) to read, because it really gets up close and uncomfortably personal with the struggle some birth mothers undergo, despite the unlimited love they have for their babies. 

This remarkable book is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious and omnivorous prose accounts of birth in the English language.

I encountered it early in my research on birth, when I was hungering for books that explored it as a topic of broad human concern and that went beyond the strictly personal. In critiquing the “institution” of motherhood, and the exploitation that has accompanied it for many women, Rich simultaneously unearths the power within birth – its fertile creativity – and imagines new ways of understanding it.

Rich is a wonderful stylist who uses what she calls an “odd-fangled” approach. I’ve loved this book for its “odd-fangledness” but also for how Rich combines critique with love, anger with reverence.