a conversation with the acclaimed memoirist Clover Stroud

"I've never felt secure as a writer. I need to work really, really, really hard at it. I think if there's a reason my work speaks to people it's that. I have no sense of complacency."

Clover Stroud is the author of several books including three acclaimed memoirs, The Wild Other, My Wild and Sleeplessness Nights, and The Red of My Blood, as well as an upcoming fourth, The Giant on the Skyline, which you can preorder now.

You’re probably thinking, ‘Whoa, that’s a whole lot of memoirs for someone still in her forties!’ and you’d be right. But while Stroud’s life certainly justifies the output just in terms of the sheer event, her work is intimate in scope, an investigation of her own human experience which manages to be brutally honest without ever feeling oversharey. It’s the emotive, dreamlike quality of her sentences and the acuity of observation, I think, a quality that places her books in a category of their own when it comes to contemporary memoir. Stroud is just as adept at describing the persistent heartache of grief as she is at describing the claustrophobia and intimacy of caring for small children, daughterhood, sisterhood, friendship, writerhood, and the erotic cycles of marriage. She’s lived through more than her fair share of tragedy (the premature loss of her mother in a riding accident and, decades later, the death of her sister Nell, to cancer) as well as an abundance of happy chaos and joy. She is the mother of five children, a former journalist and broadcaster, host of a new hit podcast, and a passionate defender of enduring commitment, having found love the second time round.

Stroud grew up in Wiltshire and has since then lived most of her life in London and the surrounding countryside, however recently she and her husband Pete transplanted their brood to Washington DC for his work. Her most recent book, The Giant on the Skyline, is both a mediation on home and the story of that epic trans-Atlantic move in all its alienation and discovery. Despite all the emotional and physical upheaval in her life, Stroud’s project is a resolutely interior literary undertaking. She is less interested in trauma or dramatic events than her own emotional and intellectual responses to them. Her recently launched Substack, On The Way Life Feels, is a testimony to this gift — check it out.

Our conversation was recorded on Valentine’s Day, and maybe because of that, we talked a lot about love and intimacy (often in graphic detail!) touching on monogamy vs. polyamory, marriage vs. singledom, emotional connection vs. chaos, the orgasmic qualities of “creative flow” as well as the eternal chicken-egg question of whether insanely hot sex is the cause of female baby-hunger or vice-versa. I hope you enjoy watching our chat as much as I enjoyed having it. I’ve posted both the audio and video versions below.