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The Wild Other by Clover Stroud

The Wild Other by Clover Stroud
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£20.00

On 25 November 1991, when Clover Stroud was 16, her idyllic Wiltshire childhood came to an abrupt end, said Helen Davies in The Sunday Times. Stroud’s 52-year-old mother, Charlotte, “suffered a catastrophic riding accident”. Though it didn’t quite kill her, she was in a coma for three months, and when she finally woke, was severely brain damaged. (Despite this, she lived on for another 22 years.) Stroud’s memoir, The Wild Other, is a “remarkable account of slow-motion grief, and the ragged, jagged fallout”. Discovering that danger could both “numb her emotions and make her feel alive”, Stroud embraced a life of “reckless abandon”. In the years that followed, she took off on risky foreign adventures, became an enthusiastic raver and drug-taker, and had “a lot of sex”. (Amid all this, she also managed to get a degree from Oxford.) “Wild men” came and went: a “vagabond gypsy” called Brad; a Texas cowboy; a first marriage to an alcoholic; an affair with a Cossack horseman. Now married for a second time, and with five children, Stroud’s life is finally more settled – though The Wild Other opens with an account of a recent bout of post-natal depression. Penetrating and candid, this is a book not just about the “ache” of loss, but about how Stroud has “carved out her own domestic happiness”.

One constant through it all has been Stroud’s love of horses, said Juliet Nicolson in The Daily Telegraph. After her mother’s accident, there was no question of Stroud giving up riding; instead, it became a way of “facing down” the tragedy. Within weeks, she was back in the saddle – on her mother’s horse, Joe. At once a “love letter” to her “numinous” childhood, and a “requiem” for the tragedy that destroyed it, The Wild Other is an “astonishing” book.