But to keep ourselves on our toes, we have a rule that author gender is alternated, girl-boy-girl-boy, and the continents always rotated (with occasional glitches). 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. At times I felt it a touch melodramatic and exaggerating in a chaotic negative fashion, but for a lot of it that worked and probably wasn't too far off the reality. I can see how this book might not be for everyone, but by writing this brave, open memoir Clover Stroud gives a gift to other women, and lays a path for more of us to do the same.

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. For Stroud, there is no question of an epidural: labour is and needs to be an extreme experience, which takes her to the brink of life and death, and “feels to me like the very reason I was put on this planet”. Clover describes the bliss of being a new mother and the complete immersion you have whilst parenting young children through to navigating the way your relationship changes once your children grow through their teen years, ready to leave the nest.

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.

And the love you have for your children can be a stressful, violent kind of love and I wish that was talked about more. 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.The title to be read and discussed is sign-posted and on sale for the whole of the previous month (with a discount for those who make it known they intend to come) and everybody is welcome, whether first-timer, part-timer or regular-timer. The book is not always pretty, and sometimes its directness is shocking, but it is full of love and honesty. 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”.