In this series of interviews, I will be talking to memoirists, both published and working towards publication, about their writing process, and how writing memoir has helped them better understand themselves and their place in the world. I am also interested in how a writer navigates difficult territory for themselves and those they love. As well as featuring the interviews here on my blog site, I will be using them as research for my upcoming publication, INTO BEING: The Radical Craft of Memoir and its Power to Transform (published by MUP in 2025).

My 16th interview is with Clover Stroud who I hugely admire. She has managed to do the difficult task of writing serial memoirs, each distinctly different from the last. Her latest is The Giant on the Skyline, is no exception. It is about our relationship to place and home, and the deep and resonant emotions place holds for us at different points in our lives. I loved this book – in lots of ways I found it the best of the bunch (although I am also a huge fan of Clover’s first memoir), as I love its outward looking polyphonic stance, as Clover includes conversations she has with the people who live in and inhabit the Oxfordshire landscape she writes about. Clover’s writing has a very distinct personality, and she doesn’t shy away from getting to the heart of the matter. Her writing is bold, honest and courageous.

Clover’s first book, The Wild Other, was shortlisted for The Wainwright Prize. Her critically acclaimed second book, My Wild & Sleepless Nights: A Mother’s Story and third book The Red of My Blood were instant Sunday Times bestsellers and rated ‘best books of the year’ in which they were published. Her fourth memoir, The Giant on The Skyline, was published in May 2024. She hosts the popular podcast, Tiny Acts of Bravery, and her Substack ‘On The Way Life Feels‘ is an outlet for Clover to write about the moments that make up our extraordinary lives, especially related to creativity, relationships, sobriety, motherhood, grief and joy. Originally from Oxfordshire, she is currently living in Washington DC with her husband and the youngest three of her five children.

This is an edited version of a face to face conversation Clover and I had over on my Substack. You can watch the video here

When and how did you realise that you wanted to write The Giant on the Skyline?

I’m aware that I’m unusual for having written four memoirs, and I’m starting a fifth at the moment. My first book, The Wild Other, is more like a traditional memoir, where a lot of stuff happens, with a big traumatic accident at the heart of it, which happened to my mum. The accident and her paralysis that followed sends me out into different geographical locations and into dangerous situations. But the reader witnesses me moving from a young, innocent to a traumatised girl to a woman. And there’s a lot of action. And the rest of my books, don’t do that. They take an emotion, hold it to the light, and look at it from every angle. So I’ve taken motherhood, I’ve taken grief, and then The Giant on Skyline is about home. It wasn’t because I thought, oh, well, home is a good topic to write about next. It was because home was a feeling and an anxiety that had been driving me in some way since I can first remember feeling.

One of my earliest memories is homesickness and longing for home. I was about five, and away for one night, and I remember a deep anxiety about where home had gone. And in a way that feeling of needing home, a curiosity around it, a desire to create it, a desire to leave it, a desire to carry it forward to create something for my children has been there since I was very young. So it wasn’t as though I sat down and thought, well, what’s the next topic? I think of it as little fists inside your head pummelling to get out. Because to sustain an idea throughout an entire book requires incredible stamina and incredible tenacity and a very strong desire to keep going. And the voices in your head that say… You shouldn’t be writing this. You don’t have a right to say all of this. Who’s interested in your story? You should go and do anything other than this … are very, very loud! So the emotion or the concept that you’re writing has to be compelling enough to override those voices that make you want to stop.

When you write multiple memoirs, like I do, they need to chase emotional concepts, because none of us have lives so full of calamities that we can write memoir after memoir, following big calamitous events. I mean, I don’t want any more calamity. I don’t want to write any more memoirs about big traumas and tragedies. So the multiple memoirs are about the huge feelings of being a human being that happen to us every single day. That’s how I see it anyway.

I also get from your writing a sense of you grasping at something, trying to understand something that haunts you. As if there is something not quite resolved in you that you want to further explore in a book?

Yes, definitely. One thing I wanted to better understand was that sense of homesickness and yearning, even when I was at home. Why, when standing in my kitchen, did I still feel a strange sense of longing? What was it that I was longing for? And so it was about the actual physical being of the house and that space I’d created with the children. But then I moved outwards to look at the landscape of the area that I lived in, South Oxfordshire, full of standing stones, and very beautiful, and tried to understand my emotional connection to place.

In a way, I think having a sense of loneliness when at home is actually a very human condition. And I’m really interested in the way feeling lonely is perhaps just feeling human, and that we try to solve it with friendships and food, but it’s insatiable really because it is about being alive and being human. However happy you can be or however contented, settled, satisfied by a relationship, you know, work, colleagues, friendships, relationships with your children, with the people around you that you love and care for, there is still a solitary nature in the emotional journey.

I felt this most strongly when I was grieving my sister. I’m really close to my children and but knew they were going through a really different experience from me. They were also going through an acute experience, but it was very, very different. That’s why the inside of your head is such a scary place, isn’t it? Nobody can be inside your head in the same way. Nobody can be with you in that place that you have to go to when there is emotional change or resolution that needs to happen.

And yet you chose to write. And so in a way, does writing become a kind of companion because it becomes that way of exploring those very private and intimate thoughts? Does it become a way to alleviate that sense of solitariness or loneliness and a means of communication, too?

Yes, writing gives you an emotional connection. Whether to myself and my own experience, or with an unseen, or an unknown person. Not an audience, because I’m not ever writing for an audience. Emotion is a chaotic thing, isn’t it? It’s very hard to pin down because it’s s feeling. Whereas writing, I think, can externalise that and it can concretise something that can feel very baffling when it’s inside ourselves. I always link emotion to colour, and find it useful as a way to articulate what it is to be human. The way that the events I am living through and the things I am seeing and the coincidences that I am noticing and also creating around me all the time are part of that and that’s a deeply satisfying place to live inside.

You talk about coincidences do you mean that there’s a sort of pattern to life, or a reason why things happen? And do you think the process of writing or creativity informs that?

Yeah, I think it informs things and you start to see events with a new kind of beauty and a new kind of emotional resonance. There’s a scene in The Red of My Blood which captures a moment after my sister died and I was in my home in Oxfordshire and I was just making breakfast for the kids and cornflakes and spilt milk. And then three black horses walked into the yard, and it makes me feel like I want to cry because it felt like such a powerful kind of representation of death and life arriving. It was also an inconvenience because some horses locally had got out because a fence had come down and their head collars had come off. A different mind would see the practical nature of it. But if you’re an artist, you see the possibilities. And once you allow yourself to see the possibilities, things start happening around you that feed into your ideas. I don’t think that they happen for a reason. I think it’s coming from your perception.

But I wonder also if it’s like opening up the channels. You know when you’re trapped in yourself and in that pain or grief and not able to recognise what’s happening in your subconscious, you’re not even listening to your dreams. You’re not even paying attention to what’s going on inside you. But if you open the channels all that starts to flow. And therefore, you’re going to be more aware of what those signs are or, you know. That person walking towards you is potentially going to give you some wisdom if you stop and talk to them.

Yes. I’ve developed a really strong interest in Mark Rothko and his work, which is deeply emotional.  I’ve spent a long time now with his work, thinking about it, standing in front of it, going to lectures about him, reading books about him. I don’t know where that’s taking me. And, you know, it’s probably more knowledge than I needed to have about Mark Rothko, but it is also possibility. If something is pulls you in that direction, then walk towards it.

That brings me back to your latest book, The Giant on the Skyline, because some of the strongest parts of that book for me are the conversations that you have with the local people near the Ridgeway, where your house is.  The book becomes a kind of polyphonic memoir because their voices matter as well, they’re part of the story. I wonder if you hadn’t been writing the book, would you have seen the significance in those conversations?

I also believe that when you write, you create the circumstances to have more of those kinds of conversations, and you begin to look at interactions or things that you’ve noticed with a different lens. And that’s one of the reasons I love writing. For the period of time that I’m writing the book, a great deal of what I’m thinking about, and the conversations that I’m searching out are around a topic. So it’s like a real deep immersion in that feeling. When I was a journalist I could immerse myself in a topic for two weeks if I was lucky, and then you’d be on to the next thing. And it is really deeply satisfying creatively now to be able to deep dive for 18 months or so, between germination and the finished product, to see the world through that particular lens.

Do you feel having written so many memoirs that your relationship with your subject has changed after you’ve written a book? So for instance, your first one was about your mother and your second was about your children, and then your third was within the year of your sister’s death so very raw feelings.  Did the book become a kind of catharsis or would you not go as far as to say that?

I’m always interested by the idea of memoir writing and catharsis and how much a process of catharsis actually happens or it’s more a process of picking the scab and then it just bleeding and bleeding and bleeding. In order for me to write with the emotional intensity and clarity, I genuinely have to re-feel the emotion. And I’m aware when I look back on each book that they do have an intensity. And I’ve sometimes thought, gosh, well, what would it be like to write a book about motherhood now? I’m in such a different stage of parenting. My youngest is now seven, and my oldest is 23. It’s still very full on. And there’s five people still with their own needs. But it doesn’t have the same force that it had, the force that made me want to write a book about it.

I don’t think grief is ever fully resolved, but when I think about it like this, there has been a process of catharsis because something has been solved. It has been soothed and it has been helped by writing, certainly. And as for home, it’s interesting because I’m now living in Washington DC and in a way my feelings around home are even stronger than when I wrote that book because of being able to see it from a distance and missing it and wondering about it.

I do think it’s given me a great appreciation of place and a great appreciation of the emotional, resonance of England. I don’t want to sound nationalistic, but I do feel like a deep, deep love of England in a way.

Do you think that the relationship that you have with your readers is also a kind of catharsis in a way because it’s a way of objectifying the material perhaps, it’s a way of seeing it through someone else’s eyes or someone else’s experience?

Well, it’s a way of communicating about it and having a conversation about it. One of the things that I love when I’m writing is that a book triggers a conversation with other people. That’s part of the reason I love social media. I love the idea that my words go into someone’s head when they read my book, and if I meet them at an event or on social media and we share an interaction, then some of their experience will go into my head as well. There becomes a shared sense of humanity. I’m a writer because I’m really, really interested in human beings and the decisions that we make, why we do things, why we don’t do things, you know, where we choose to live, where we choose to work, how we’ve been brought up, the relationships we choose, how they fail, how they work, you know, our relationships with our kids, why we don’t choose to have children, all of those things. I’m fascinated. And I absolutely love talking to individuals about their motivations. I don’t know if this is catharsis. I think it’s communication rather than catharsis.

But so many people walk through life with blinkers on because they just have to. They may be readers, but they’re not in that sort of natural state of wanting to interrogate and pick apart and really try and understand. And so experiences happen to them, but they don’t have the privilege of spending lots of time with it unless they go to therapy, unless they decide to write about it. They might have experienced what you’ve written about, but they haven’t found the words to articulate it, or they haven’t had the courage perhaps to speak out about it because it’s not in their daily lives. Or they’re too busy with work or being a mother, or just general life. So I think in a way it can be a type of catharsis for a reader to read the words they themselves haven’t articulated, to enable a space for them to explore things that they that they might not have allowed themselves to explore. Do you see what I mean?

I guess that’s true, actually. And I’ve had readers contact me and say this really helped me to understand an aspect of my life. I find this incredibly gratifying. I definitely believe that when you write memoir you’re in a really privileged position of being able to acutely analyse emotion and action, and you can put words around emotion. And people often say, that’s exactly what I was feeling. I just didn’t really know it. Or somebody sent me a message yesterday on Instagram saying, as a midlife woman, you know, the way that you talk about life has helped me to realise my own experience. And that’s a really, really wonderful, wonderful feeling, isn’t it?

You’ve built up a reputation over the years. How has that affected your voice? Because I’m really interested in voice in memoir, and how as a reader, we are invested in reading memoir for the extraordinary story, but mostly because we identify with the person who’s telling that story. Is voice something that came naturally to you or is something that you’ve had to consciously develop, or has it been different with every book that you’ve written?

I think that it was there when I read my very early writing, my early journalism, I really noticed that my voice is quite strong and it’s there. As I’ve got older, I’ve got more creative in the way that I express emotion. And I think because I’m spending more time thinking about it and I’ve become more serious in the way that I think about it. I don’t drink, for instance. I feel strongly that I want my writing to improve with each book.

At times, I’ve thought Oh god I’m sick of my voice, I want a broader stroke or I might look at someone else’s voice and try and do what they’re doing. But you can’t when you’re writing memoir, because the voice is the personality isn’t it? It would be a little bit like you’re trying to be someone else which I think in memoir you can’t get away with because a reader will probably pick up on that. It’s like when you try and radically change the way you dress. You suddenly put an on outfit that looks amazing on that six foot four woman over there, but not so good on you!

It’s also so important to have confidence in that voice to allow it to be louder and to be stronger to override the instinct to self censor or shut yourself down. When I look back at stuff I’ve written where I’ve allowed myself to write freely: often the most interesting stuff is happening when you’re really, really trying to just be you on the page. People often ask does your writing just flow out? Well, no, it really doesn’t. It goes through multiple drafts. It’s an incredibly painful process. It’s an incredibly painstaking, slow process. It’s not like I’m writing just reams and reams of words and then cutting it down to the few that work.

For me, it’s often driven by emotion. I need to have an emotional connection with what I’m writing about. And I find that kind of writing really freeing as well. I read recently, Philip Lopate was talking about characterization in personal narrative and how writers should identify their quirks and what makes them specific. You know, what is Clover? Who is Clover? What is Clover’s personality? And I sort of thought, well, that’s weird. You know, I can’t really kind of view myself in that self-conscious way. You know, who am I? What am I like? And I started to think about that.

And actually, I realised that whoever I am through my writing is possibly not who I am as a person, but there is something that comes through my writing that is obviously an essence of me. And I just wondered if that’s something that you’ve become aware of with the multiple memoirs?

I think that I’m trying to describe normal. Like I knew when I was writing the book about grief, for example, that I was writing about being in my bedroom and going through something epic, processing the death of my sister. And down the corridor… my young sons who were about five and eight then were having a spitting competition, or who could throw their shoes furthest down the stairs. I know that it makes it relatable because that’s the way that I’m experiencing real life. And I think that people do relate to that. But I’m also trying to do something new with each book. I never want someone to pick it up and just think, oh, you know, here’s more, yeah, here’s more of that kind of chaos and emotion colliding. Yeah, just applying it to different things. Getting on and off the plane and losing your bags.

How do you protect yourself when you’re writing about trauma? Do you think it’s more powerful to write around trauma rather than actually write the trauma itself? It can be more powerful to leave space and leave it to the imagination? 

You never want it to be gratuitous. I didn’t want to write about the moments of my sister’s death. I wrote a bit about the time around it, but I didn’t write about the second day when she was dying because… for obvious reasons of privacy, but also you don’t need, as a reader, to be taken to that place. If a writer describes a lifeless body being held, it can even detract from the power of what’s happening around it. I’ve always felt as though I’m writing right into the heart of it, but that doesn’t mean writing the whole of it. Rather than getting hung up on the detail, it’s more about the way I feel.

How do we prevent ourselves from being re-traumatised through the writing? We have to check in with ourselves don’t we as to what the effect will be to have those words out there in the world that we will always be associated with and whether it’s always necessary?

I write about things that my children have done, but I’m not really writing about them. There isn’t a great deal of detail. I don’t think that you would read my books and know my children very well from reading my books. When you see my kids on Instagram, it’s only a version of life. The life that we’re living in this room is very different. My family’s experience of our family life is very different from what I explore in my books, which comes out of an artistic creation.

Do you think that memoir becomes a space to explore the unspeakable? You know, the things that are hard to say or to speak about?

When people are new to writing and say, I’m scared by it, I always say – I really think that the page is actually a really safe space to be. When we finish this conversation, I’ll have to go and sit on my own in the library and face the fear of trying to express something. And actually there’s nothing to be afraid of because nobody’s going to see that first version. And of we all feel, is it good enough? The good enough question should comes much later in the process. I’ve been reading that Miranda July book, All Fours, about midlife and desire. And it’s a full on book where she says stuff, a lot of stuff, which is quite shocking and actually I haven’t really seen written about before. But it’s a courageous and exciting book.

It’s part of being in a conversation. You read the Miranda July book, and it probably gives you more confidence to go to difficult places in yourself when you write. And then, you know, someone else reads you and thinks, oh, well, yeah, actually, maybe I can write this experience that I’ve had. And, you know, and then that’s what you’re hoping, isn’t it? It’s like a domino effect that actually…everybody influences everybody else in a positive way.

Definitely. And when you feel that happening with your writing, like the motherhood book, My Wild and Sleepless Nights, I know really helped a lot of mothers to feel less alone and less challenged by motherhood. It kind of legitimized what they were feeling and knowing that you’re actually creating a positive emotional change and have helped people. And that’s why, you know, doing events is really lovely when you get to meet people who come and say, your writing has really really helped me, and that’s what enables me to keep on going back to the desk to write.

Lovely place to end Clover thank you so much for your time

Yeah a lovely conversation, thank you very very much Lily