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My Wild and Sleepless Nights

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My Wild and Sleepless Nights

By: Clover Stroud
Narrated by: Clover Stroud
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

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.

Charting the course of one year, the first in her youngest child’s life, Clover searches for answers to questions that many of us would be too afraid to admit to – not only about motherhood, but also about female sexuality and identity. Her story will speak to all mothers, and anyone about to embark on that journey.

'Clover Stroud is a remarkable woman, and an incredible writer.' - Bryony Gordon
‘Clover Stroud is a force of nature.’ Elizabeth Gilbert

© Clover Stroud 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

 Gender Studies Parenting & Families Relationships Social Sciences Thought-Provoking

Critic Reviews

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.
The best evocation of the all-consuming, self-eroding reality of motherhood, while also being luminous with love.
What 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.
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)
This is quite simply the best book about motherhood I have ever read: touching, tender, honest and true. Even as she’s bracingly direct about the frustrations of motherhood, Stroud also revels in the delights. Bliss and boredom coexist side by side — and the contradictions are at the core of it all. Stroud’s book will give anyone heading out on this fearsome journey a lantern to guide the way. The book is not always pretty, and sometimes its directness is shocking, but it is full of love and honesty.
Brilliant motherhood memoir...Clover Stroud is one of the very best writers on the light and dark of motherhood and, if you enjoyed her debut The Wild Other, you'll love this. The book follows the first year of her fifth child's life as she juggles looking after a newborn with dealing with her teenage son's problematic behaviour. The writing is sublime and honest.
Best Books of 2020: a touching guide to the joys and terrors of parenting.
A visceral story of pregnancy and domestic mayhem...[full of] raw primal maternal energy. (Libby Purves)
BEST NON-FICTION OF 2020: Clover Stroud charts the highs and lows of motherhood in all their deep, dark glory. (Sarra Manning)
Rare are the books about motherhood, rarer still; the true, the generous, tender, resonant ones. This is that book. I loved it and I love Clover’s voice.
All stars
Most relevant
Having had 4 of my 5 kids in Oxford and also blundering through motherhood o totally loved the way Clover expressed her very personal but totally relatable novel, I felt like we were put having a coffee together

Listening to my own unexpressed thoughts

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I've enjoyed listening to Clover Stroud's books from her life. I didn't start till her latest & now I'm catching up. This one, about the rawness, the love, the frustration & more about being a mother: in her case of 5, is a down to earth story I could really identify with. Not enough is shared about the myths & truths of motherhood & Clover begins a conversation I could understand... & I'm old enough to be her mother!

Clover Stroud Shares "Motherhood" & Reality.

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I do like clovers style of writing and rather enjoyed her previous book. this book has some very relatable feelings of motherhood and all the weird emotions that come with it. I found it got very repetitive and went around and around. I forced myself to finish this book and towards the middle to the end was feeling rather done with it- the storyline and the performance.

some very real unglamorous moments of motherhood.

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In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.