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. Just as being fucked so hard it hurts can feel good, this pain becomes something I recognise as clearly as I know myself. As Stroud battles through pregnancy, labour, breastfeeding, and meetings with the school about Jimmy’s weed habit, her third and fourth children, Dash and Evangeline, wheel about in a world of spilled cornflakes and imaginary cats.

However, as I started in on reading the book I was almost immediately taken in by Stroud's ability to describe everything so viscerally. I’ve not enjoyed a book about motherhood more, it was beautiful and brilliant and I would recommend to all mothers. At the same time the book is in places hilariously funny and I laughed out loud many times, and at other times I felt tears coming as I read of her experiences and emotions.I strongly related to hearing how lonely being a mother can be whilst also feeling astronomical amounts of love for your child. I am nosy about how other women 'do' motherhood, but mainly I feel a need to share, to be seen, to speak uninhibited about the extraordinary experiences, challenges, changes being a mother brings.

You feel the roller coaster ride of family life, from the rawness of birth through to the mundane of family life. Some beautiful writing and captures moments in motherhood so well, but overall I don’t relate to the author and I find some of it a bit needlessly melodramatic. The discord between relationship with self and relationships as mother which I'm still growing into. I feel this book contained so many of the conversations I would like to have with my mother girlfriends but yet never seem to have the time for and perhaps I lack the ability to admit some truths. And while she is acutely alive to its joys – sexual, exhausting, earthy joys – these are always intertwined with darkness and difficulty.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.