The best-selling author of The Wild Other and The Red of My Blood on why each moment of life - the good and the bad - must be savoured.&nbsp;

The best-selling author, horsewoman and mother-of-five <a href="https://www.instagram.com/clover.stroud/?hl=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Clover Stroud</a> was raised in a large, bohemian, horse-mad family in Oxfordshire. When she was 16, Clover&rsquo;s mother was involved in a riding accident that resulted in severe brain damage. She never recovered from her injuries. An unconventional adolescence followed for Clover and her older sister, Nell, as both became entangled in alternative modes of living as a way of dealing with their trauma. Clover spent several years travelling the country with gypsy families, as well as working both as a race jockey in the UK and a ranch hand in Texas. Nell ran away to join the circus and would go on to become the founder of England&rsquo;s beloved Gifford&rsquo;s Circus. Nell died in 2019 at the age of 45 following a ferocious battle with breast cancer. <a href="https://www.cloverstroud.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Clover</a> has spent the last decade writing about her remarkable life in a series of heart-stopping memoirs. She writes unflinchingly about love, sex, grief and death, wrapping her words with pinpoint accuracy around that which is inherently indescribable: the extraordinary nature of life and death.&nbsp;

On Mother's Day, in response to the suggestion that for mothers to celebrate on social media is insensitive to those without children, you said &ndash; in a post that received hundreds of comments - that &lsquo;life is inherently unfair, absolutely unequal, wrong and unjust in every respect, if what we expect from it is what others have.&rsquo; Why do you think what you said struck such a nerve?
I think social media has made us all into narcissists in some way. There is a definite sense that we&nbsp; look at everything through a lens of ourselves. Social media has allowed us a window onto the intricacies of everyone else's life and the opportunity for communication that brings is wonderful. But I also think that on some level perhaps we weren&rsquo;t supposed to have access to so many people's lives. Because we are ill-equipped to manage and disseminate all these squares of information in a way that doesn&rsquo;t leave us affected. We have lost all sense of nuance, and the medium of the typed word is perhaps unhelpful. It is not the same as having a physical conversation with another human. People come away feeling offended or that they must apologise in some way. But where does the apologising for what we have stop? Or the suggestion that another person has an inherent privilege? The idea of privilege has such powerful and important connotations - we all understand what white privilege is - and I don't think the term should be co-opted so freely. Because what about health privilege? What about beauty privilege or glittering career privilege? We all have and want different things. It is not the nature of life that we are all going to be equal. There has to be a line drawn somewhere.&nbsp;

You&rsquo;ve often said that you write about how it feels to explore the very edges of your existence. What is it that drives you to take your work right to the brink?
As an individual and as a writer, what I am trying to do is to understand the oddness, the unfairness, the pain, the darkness and the extraordinary beauty of my everyday life. I'm trying to make sense of it. I am simply trying in the most sort of unflinching way I possibly can to make sense in some way of what is going on. When I&rsquo;m feeling frustrated by motherhood or when I'm feeling broken by grief, or when I am feeling bored in my marriage or annoyed with a friend, I try to really express what that feels like, because by expressing it, other people see their own experiences. The more I write in a more intimate and personal way, the more people respond to it. I think it is a great relief for other people to see somebody making mistakes and experiencing pain. I've written very openly about motherhood and about the mistakes I've made: things I got wrong with my teenage son or the ways I've really disliked a day with a toddler. With grief, I was trying to write the book I wanted to read, which was about what grief really felt like in the body and the heart and the mind. I wanted to read about someone&rsquo;s individual walk through the initial stages of grief and &ndash; crucially &ndash; know how they survived. Or if they died themselves. The Red of My Blood is about the impossibility of the grief that I was both fascinated and terrified by as I stepped into it immediately after my sister's death.
As a society we are used to turning away from pain, yet you seem to use it as a fuel for your art, turning it into something vital and beautiful and creative.&nbsp;
We humans often think of grief, frustration, boredom, trauma as the bits where life has gone wrong. I feel very strongly as though those bits are life actually happening. And that we ought to be stepping into them and really feeling them, rather than looking away from them or trying to rush through them and pretending that they don't happen. I think it&rsquo;s of the utmost importance to teach our children not to be afraid of the dark parts of our lives: not to look away from that which is painful. The idea that we should be shielded from that which scares or hurts us is not a healthy way for a society to live. Perhaps because I have had quite a lot of grief in my life, I have had to make it part of every day. There's been a great deal of death and there's been a great deal of trauma. But at the same time that has made me reach for and create and hold onto a great deal of life. A big life, full of colour. When you experience a lot of loss and grief, it gives you more of everything. More pain, of course. More neuroses. More sadness. But it also gives you more colour, more exaltation, more excitement. Life and death are inescapable and they go hand in hand with one another.

Your writing has an immediacy to it, a sort of urgency to convey our inherent mortality. Is that how you experience life in the day-to-day?&nbsp;
It&rsquo;s such a difficult one to get our head around, but I feel it&rsquo;s crucial to understand that these are the days of our lives. Not in five years when you've got more money or a bigger house, or you&rsquo;ve lost weight or you've met somebody new. That is not when it happens. It happens today. It happens now. And I think it&rsquo;s a real challenge for all of us &ndash; myself included - to practice living right inside this moment. I think when something good is happening, when something is fun, or joyful, we should acknowledge it, however small it may seem. I gave up drinking over a year ago and I find it so much easier to be in the present moment. I feel as though a barrier between me and the rest of the world has been lifted, as though a blurred lens has taken away. The immediacy and the suddenness of life in a state of sobriety is something that has really elevated the potential of my creativity.
In <a href="https://www.lofficielibiza.com/ibiza/five-beaches-for-spring-sunshine" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Ibiza</a> there&rsquo;s a definite sense that we live in tribes, as part of a wider community. As a mother who&rsquo;s created her own tribe, how does it feel when your large family grows and dynamics begin to shift?
I have loved watching the time between us stretch and elongate over so many years. It&rsquo;s not exactly cross-generational, but I had Jimmy, my eldest child when I was 24 and I had my fifth child when I was 41. I am very aware of the expansiveness of time and I find it fascinating. It&rsquo;s interesting because I'm quite solitary by nature. I love an intense one-on-one but I find big groups overwhelming, so I have come to love the self-sufficiency of a large family. It&rsquo;s a very beautiful thing but it is also incredibly difficult because the dynamics between everyone can be very complex. We are all bouncing off each other like marbles. And I suppose in a way that sums up life: it's difficult when it's big. It's brutal and it&rsquo;s hard and it&rsquo;s complicated. But it&rsquo;s also meaningful and beautiful and really, really luscious as well.

Clover Stroud: these are the days of our lives.

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