What do we mean when we talk of ‘home’?

Given that I know the author, would I feel inhibited about reviewing her new book critically, I asked myself. But other than meeting her once at a party for two minutes, I realised that I know Clover Stroud only through her raw, ravishing memoirs and – like the rest of her 37,000 Instagram followers – the intimate and honest way in which she documents her life.

Perhaps more than any other writer, Stroud has taken the elegant, elliptical memoir and forged it into the genre of life writing. She has lived a lot of life. The Wild Other documented her mother’s life-changing brain injury as a result of a riding accident when Stroud was 16. In My Wild and Sleepless Nights she tackled the tribulations of raising five children; and after the early death of her sister, the circus impresario Nell Gifford, she took on her own grief in The Red of My Blood – a book about loss which nevertheless crackled with kinetic energy.