Monthly Archives: February 2020

Cocktails, craft gin and now no-alcohol bars may be fighting for attention in London, but the UK capital is still a wine city.

It has been the focus of the worlds wine trade since long before the Bordeaux region was governed by the English crown in the Middle Ages.

Today, visitors to London can choose from hipster wine bars in the citys trendy eastern quarter, some of the worlds most eclectic restaurant wine lists and wine stores staffed by unusually knowledgeable and enthusiastic wine geeks. And, if you can score an invite, the city now has at least three private members clubs devoted to wine. Here are some places to look out for:

67 Pall Mall, Londons first private members club for wine lovers, in the heart of St Jamess, boasts a far, far wider array of fine wines 1,000 available by the gossamer-thin Zalto glass than any of the traditional gentlemens clubs in the vicinity. Women are welcome and members may store their own wines in its cellars.

This also applies to the newer Oswalds club, a wine-soaked, more spacious sister of proprietor Robin Birleys 5 Hertford Street, with fine wines at such low prices you could, in effect, save your membership fee with a single dinner.

Trade in Soho is more raffish, aimed at hospitality professionals who want to drink great wine after work.

Russian-owned Hedonism Wines in Mayfair, a shop that is effectively a luxurious wine cave, offers visitors a frequently changing roster of 48 wine treasures available to taste (for a fee). It has spawned a restaurant on Piccadilly, Hide, where customers can order any wine to be ferried round from Hedonisms shelves as well as those on the restaurants list.

The other obvious magnet for wine browsers is Berry Bros & Rudds new shop, challengingly across the street from 67 Pall Mall. Its not quite as atmospheric, nor nearly as ancient, as this family companys original premises round the corner at 3 St Jamess Street but, like Hedonism, its one of remarkably few places in London where you can buy all that fine wine that is traded in and around the capital by the single bottle.

Another possibility is one of the five Lea & Sandeman stores, in Chelsea, Fulham, Kensington, Barnes and Chiswick. Other small groups of wine shops include Jeroboams, Vagabond (whose stores double as wine bars) and The Sampler, both of which always have interesting wines on taste. Seek out Bottle Apostle and Theatre of Wine for a particularly idiosyncratic range.

A magnet for serious wine lovers is Noble Rot, a wine bar and restaurant in Bloomsbury and home of the ground-breaking wine magazine of the same name. Its proprietors are adding a second branch in Soho, on the site of the now-closed Gay Hussar restaurant, one of the most famous names in Londons political dining history.

Vinoteca, a small group of bustling wine bars with wine shops attached, has locations dotted across central London. Its wine selection traditionally has been particularly strong on Italy a much-needed specialism in Francophile London.

Quality Wines on Farringdon Road is run like a salon for food and wine lovers, with a rotating selection of wines available by the glass and a small-plates menu featuring wine bar classics and staples from neighbouring modern British restaurant Quality Chop House. Disclosure: it is co-owned by our son Will Lander, but Gus Gluck, who previously ran two Vinoteca restaurants, is given complete and particularly effective autonomy over it.

Wine importer Les Caves de Pyrene was an early advocate of natural wines. Its wine bars Terroirs and Soif, in Charing Cross and Battersea respectively, have long championed these wines made by the simplest of methods, and are not quite as prevalent on the London wine scene as in, say, north-east Paris.

London even has its own wineries now places where wine enthusiasts can experience how wine is made, using not just English grapes but those from mainland Europe too. London Cru, based in a Victorian warehouse and former gin distillery in west London, offers wine tastings to the public as well as winemaker for a day events, guiding participants through tasting and blending wine. Blackbook, located in a railway arch in Battersea, also offers tours of the winery and tastings of its range of pinot noir and chardonnay.

Where are your favourite places to buy and drink wine in London? Wed love to hear in the comments below

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Tips from the Top: Jancis Robinsons best wine addresses in London - Financial Times

Date of return: Thursday 7th May

Location: Carrer de les Alzines, 07800 Eivissa, Illes Balears

After their much talked-about debut season, Octan Ibiza returns bigger and better than ever on Thursday, 7th May 2020 to kick start their second summer in Ibiza. Their opening party will be hosting all the key residents and new ones, plus some tasteful headliners that will bring those serious non-stop grooves we became accustomed to last summer. The season programming will see weekly residencies in addition, and will also be showcasing a series of special one-offs all summer long.

In 2019, the brand new club quickly established itself as an Island and cult favourite for those looking for a more underground and intimate experience. Octans Basement is the perfect underground space that gives you a raw and intense energy alongside its dark aesthetic, low ceilings and a world class sound system. The style is sleek and stripped back with low key lighting and immersive lighting all making it an atmospheric space of pure hedonism.

Last summer saw Octan host Apollonias first weekly residency, Planet Claire, which offered the underground heads serious sets from the likes of Nicolas Lutz, Traumer, Cristi Cons, Francesco Del Garda, Doc Martin, Anthea, Pearson Sound and many more. You also saw Steve Lawler return to the Island with his Warriors brand who had artists Enzo Siragusa, GUTI, Yousef, East End Dubs, Seb Zito, Darius Syrossian and more join them in the Basement.

New for this summer, the Terrace has been fully redone and improved plus there have been various stylistic renovations inside the club. Whats more, the iconic artwork that adorns the outside of the venue will be all re-done by a brand new artist this season that will be the case at the start of every new summer. The club will be open across a number of nights during the week, with special parties next to new resident brands all catering to the beat in cutting edge house, techno and minimal.

Keep your eyes peeled for the first wave of names, but be assured that Octan is set to be the most talked about underground venue on the White Isle this summer.

Early Bird 15 tickets here: http://www.octanibiza.com

Get ready for Octan 2.0!

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Octan announce opening party and 2020 plans - Discover Ibiza

What would San Francisco be like if the plague of AIDS had never struck? Two whole generations of gay men might largely be with us. Western SoMa would probably have more than a handful of bars. And erotic photographer Robert Mapplethorpe would not only be alive hed be a mainstream artist with a billion Instagram followers.

Thats how Leo Herrera imagines it, at least, in his 45-minute, five-part film Fathers. A raucous and occasionally heartbreaking what-if, its final episode premiered at Mannys in the Mission on Dec. 1, 2019 (World AIDS Day). The film has subsequently been viewed 100,000 times on platforms like YouTube and Vimeo or more if you count the parts shown in a 2019 Emmy-winning PBS Behind the Lens documentary about the project.

The Fathers universe is one where poppers (a.k.a. amyl nitrate) are advertised on TV and protect sexually active people from STIs. The fashion designer Halstons robes help people evade surveillance. There is no Jerry Falwell although, in a way, Fathers grapples with the Christian rights outsize role in American life by setting up a queer parallel.

We dont know much about the evangelical lifestyle, but it affects our elections, Herrera says in late January outside Four Barrel Coffee, wearing a vintage T-shirt honoring the AIDS quilt. His vision gives queers that outsize influence instead. In the America that Fathers imagines, no matter where you were, there would be these pockets of queer people creating their own sort of culture. I thought that was fascinating.

A project five years in the making, Fathers is a rejoinder to decades of moral panic about sex, drug use and disco. Narrated by a female voice with an affectless British accent, it has the air of a bizarro-America documentary. Stonewall Nation and the Queer Colonies are the films more or less interchangeable terms for Herreras LGBTQ country-within-a-country, a loose constellation of communes rooted in 20th century gay Mardi Gras krewes. They are joyous, uninhibited places, the vital center of American cultural life, marshaling hedonism to bring about social change, reinvigorating decayed cities and becoming home to the highest life expectancies in the nation.

Herrera, 38, was born in Mexico, grew up in Phoenix and lives in Hayes Valley. In addition to filmmaking, hes also a painter, essayist and occasional politico, having managed Tom Tempranos campaign for S.F. school board. Post-Fathers, hes revisiting a novel he began writing in 2005 that describes a dystopian San Francisco whose problems are todays afflictions in reverse, a sort of cyberpunk Tales of the City if that city were also broke and under constant surveillance. Herrera hasnt found his Michael Tolliver yet, but the characters are based on people he knows.

There is one character whos obsessed with free plastic surgery, he says. One of them is Mother, a big bear whos a matriarch of this commune of wayward boys living in a burnt-out version of the Vida complex in the Mission. But instead of a beacon of gentrification, its this community hub, a derelict, dilapidated apartment complex where all these squatters live.

At times, Fathers revels in similar tensions between utopia and dystopia. Colonies, for instance, is a curious term, generally referring to places in need of liberation, not exponents of it. Herrera chalks this up to the type-to-text software that gave the narrator her voice.

She said colonies better, he says. But my idea of liberation would be that we live in these uninterrupted communes. The most utopic moments Ive had were when we were left on our own, like the Radical Faeries, a loosely affiliated movement of left-leaning, artistically inclined queer pagans.

Even the phrase Stonewall Nation isnt pure. It hails from an unrealized, back-to-the-land movement by early-70s San Francisco gays to take over rural Alpine County in the Sierra Nevada and run it as their own. The Oakland Museum of Californias Queer California exhibit in 2019 included a not-so-fast response to that idea from local indigeneous leaders, who took a dim view to being dispossessed. Herrera, who is Latinx, acknowledges this while also observing that queer and Native identities are hardly in conflict; many indigenous cultures have long accepted nonbinary or two-spirit people.

The inclusive, utopian vision of Fathers is not a separatist one, either. In it, the activist and film historian Vito Russo who authored The Celluloid Closet, the definitive account of gay Hollywood is an ambassdador from the Queer Colonies who wins the 2020 presidential election. He therefore becomes the leader of the whole of America, not just Stonewall Nation.

In the films internal chronology, it is legal advocacy by a real-life 1980s GOP attorney and leatherman named Duke Armstrong that helps the Colonies gain recognition as a religious organization, elevating gay bars to the status of churches and protecting them from evictions. In other words, this utopian vision owes itself in part to a white Republican, albeit one who fought to keep the bathhouses open before dying at 39.

Fathers was filmed over several years in New York and Fire Island, New Orleans, Mexico, San Francisco, rural Northern California and Provincetown, Mass. Queer-identified Bay Area residents will surely recognize locales like SF Underground in Lower Haight, the AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park, or the Saratoga Springs Retreat Center near Clear Lake in Lake County, along with performers like Sister Roma from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and Jake Shears.

As for the future of Fathers: Herrera has submitted the project to multiple film festivals, although, as he says, not all of them have a category for episodic features, so thats a little bit of a challenge. Hes also at work at finding widespread distribution and recutting it for Dolby Surround Sound, which would eliminate the credits that conclude each episode.

Except that its not finished. Like Tony Kushners two-part Angels in America which the playwright has rewritten several times, even after it won a Pulitzer and a Tony Fathers is something of a palimpsest. A section on the performer Sylvester was taken out to give space to Roxana Hernandez, a trans migrant who died of complications from AIDS in 2018 while in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Herrera makes these alterations less out of dissatisfaction than because creating the film largely on his own has been such a costly, time-consuming undertaking.

Its never going to be complete, he says. I want to say that my part will be done and if I did get hit by a bus Its hard to work on a project where all the people died making art at your age and youre constantly thinking about them.

One scene that has proven to be a roadblock in terms of promotion depicts footage of a real-life orgy in New York. Setting a new benchmark for NSFW art meant that censorship on YouTube and Instagram was probably inevitable. But Herrera also believes hes been occasionally shadowbanned for violating vaguely worded community standards, particularly by the third-party processor that handles payments for the crowdfunding site Indiegogo.

Our Indiegogo campaign was shut off a day before it was supposed to be finished, which is the most important day, he says. And Facebook wont let me take out ads for Fathers. They wont let me promote articles about it, even if the clips are G-rated.

What really pisses me off is that if I have two men kissing, or if theres a butt or too many shirtless men, Im not allowed to post that or the sponsored posts get taken down, he adds. But if you do a search for Burning Man girls, theres half a million half-naked women running around the playa.

But Herreras targets arent just hypocrites and puritans. Fathers allots screen time to a NOLA Carnival-goer who dismisses San Francisco AIDS documentaries as overly grim, saying that you have to have something to laugh about. Outrage can be exhausting, the film argues, and for people to get up and fight another day, they need to be touched. They need to be surrounded by beautiful things. They need exposure to radiant joy, even if that looks like cruising at funerals.

This is the camp essence of Leo Herreras queer theology, perhaps with the baroque freak Klaus Nomi as its pope. Liberation, as Herrera defines it, is strength in numbers and freedom from the heterosexual gaze. Hes consequently nonplussed by reactions to Fathers that boil down to AIDS was almost a blessing because it helped LGBTQ people win political rights.

Thats wrong, he says, because it depends on the straight, cis gaze to dictate what made us human. So his touching and gleefully raunchy film is a plausible path away from that. The pre-AIDS moment of liberation in the late 1970s was so achingly brief that its practically a Greek tragedy, and the films attempt to recapture its dynamism demonstrates the ur-hope of progressives everywhere: A better world is possible.

Peter Lawrence Kane is a Bay Area freelance writer. Email: culture@sfchronicle.com

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Leo Herreras film Fathers asks: What if AIDS never touched San Francisco? - San Francisco Chronicle

She thought it was an opportunity for a relaxing Caribbean vacation.

Instead, for a few weeks in the late 2000s, she said she found herself squarely in a den of iniquity, captained by its hedonistic owner Winnipeg fashion mogul Peter Nygard at his compound in the Bahamas.

"I wasn't a part of the sexual lifestyle and I never witnessed any sex or sodomy but everybody went around topless," a former Winnipeg woman, who asked her name not be published, said Friday.

The woman said she was visiting the Nygard Cay compound as the guest of an employee.

"(Nygard) would have 'pamper parties' he had a (stripper's) pole on his plane... There was a lot of parties... I took one girl to a dentist once, and I saw a dental assistant and I said, 'I didn't recognize you with your clothes on.' I'd seen her at the pamper parties bouncing around, but now she looked totally professional."

Another time, at the dock as Nygard's yacht came in, the woman said she saw the multi-millionaire on the deck, with a woman performing a sex act on him.

SUPPLIED PHOTO

Nygard at his home in the Bahamas.

"He just stood up, zipped up his pants and that was it," she said. "I heard people asked for the morning-after pill I didn't even know what that was at the time."

Nygard, 78, is currently facing claims in a class-action civil lawsuit that he lured women some under the age of 18 to his Bahamian estate, where he drugged, assaulted, raped and sodomized them. The allegations of 10 women are listed in the 99-page lawsuit, filed in New York City.

Since news of the lawsuit went public more than a week ago, lawyers heading the court action say dozens of other possible victims have come forward, as well as numerous alleged witnesses.

No statement of defence has been filed, and the allegations haven't been proven in court.

Nygard through his lawyer has denied all of the allegations.

Meanwhile, the former Winnipeg woman said Friday she never saw any acts at Nygard Cay that weren't consensual. She said she didn't take in the nightlife there on a regular basis, and only ventured once into the compound's disco.

"No one ever came down asking for assistance," she said. "I didn't hear anybody being raped. If I had, I would have tried to help them.

SUPPLIED PHOTO

Nygard claims to have hosted many star-studded events at the residence.

"You have to remember: it was invite-only; no one snuck in there. The gates... have to be opened by security," she said. "People were there and (Nygard) knew they were there. They would take a photo of everyone going in and they would keep it.

"It wasn't just women anyone who went in had their photo taken."

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The woman said she wasn't just bothered by the hedonism she witnessed, but also the shoddy treatment of employees at the compound.

"There would be workers standing on two-by-fours on top of rocks washing the windows and there were a lot of windows there," she said. "But, if they were to complain, there were 20 people in line to take their jobs.

"It didn't matter which way you looked, there were always people trying to do what they could to survive... I was glad to leave."

More than a decade later, the woman said just hearing the Nygard name or seeing clothes from his fashion lines takes her back to those few weeks.

"I still wear his clothing, I like the quality of some of his clothes," she said. "But it's not somewhere I want to go back and visit."

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca

Kevin RollasonReporter

Kevin Rollason is one of the more versatile reporters at the Winnipeg Free Press.Whether it is covering city hall, the law courts, or general reporting, Rollason can be counted on to not only answer the 5 Ws Who, What, When, Where and Why but to do it in an interesting and accessible way for readers.

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'I didn't recognize you with your clothes on': woman recounts visit to Nygard Cay - Winnipeg Free Press

The Positivus lineup will also feature SAINt JHN, EarthGang, Ari Lennox, Georgia, Yves Tumor & Its band, Black Midi, FLOHIO, Working Men's Club, JC Stewart and Beissoul & Einius on July 17 and 18 in Salacgrva, according to festival organizers on February 26.

SAINt JHN began his musical career writing songs for such artists as Usher, Jidenna, Hoodie Allen and others. His most well-known collaborations include working with Beyonce to create the song Brown Skin Girl and working with Lenny Kravitz on the song "Borders". The remix to his song "Roses" is currently one of the most popular tracks in the world.

The Atlanta-based hip hop duo Olu (aka Johnny Venus) and WowGr8 (aka Doctur Dot) are the two members of EarthGang, which co-founded the musical collective Spillage Village and is currently represented by the Dreamville label. One of their most successful tracks to date is a collaborative project with Young Thug on a single called "Proud of You".

American singer and songwriter Ari Lennox has a unique voice frequently compared to the vocal accomplishments of Mariah Carey. Her debut album "Shea Butter Baby" (title track is a collaboration with J. Cole) has been nominated for the "Soul Train Awards".

Georgia is one of the summer's most in-demand artists with her eclectic electronic music inspired by MIA and Hudson Mohawke. Her dance music flirts between hedonism, other-worldliness and personal self-discovery combined with influences from hip hop, punk and Missy Elliott. Her single About Work the Dancefloor has gained wide popularity.

Yves Tumor & Its band is glamorously grotesque visually, selectively eclectic musically and has always had interesting live performances. Their album Safe in the Hands of Love" performed a sold-out concert tour in Eirop and was acclaimed by Pitchfork as best new album. Their new album "Heaven to a Tortured Mind" will be released on April 3.

The new indie group Black Midi began performing at festivals last summer. The combine experimental rock music, jazz and avant-gardemusic through improvization. The New York Times named their newest album "Schlagenheim" one of the top 10 new albums in 2019.

FLOHIO has announced herself to the world of hip hop with their new album "Wild Yout". The UK-based rapper's music has influences of grime, EDM and trap elements.

The newly founded post-punk group Working Men's Club is influenced by both techno, as well as jazzy piano riffs. Despite being relatively new they've had two strong hits: the post-punk style "Bad Blood" and electronic "Teeth".

Irish singer JC Stewart creates emotional, heart-warming music. Hisvoice has a soaring soulfulness, while managing to be saturated with emotional resonance. Hisnew single "Have You Had Enough Wine?" has gained recognition from critics and audiences.

Beissoul & Einius is the newest pop sensation from Lithuania. The duet calls themselves global electronic music style icons. Their live concerts feature charismatic, movement-filled, hypnotic electronic music with surrealistic costumes.

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Positivus lineup to include SAINt JHN and EarthGang - Eng.Lsm.lv

"When Tim is telling this story [in the film] he gets choked up, because he said he'd never seen anything more compassionate," Lunch continues. "It was his friend, who then not only wrote me this incredible letter but also he got sober and has been sober ever since.

"That moment really flips the script of the documentary. It makes you go, 'Well of course, she's f---ing compassionate'."

I am always trying to get to the root of not only my own insanity, but this global and political patriarchal insanity.

Skyping from her Brooklyn apartment, Lunch speaks with the ravaged resonance of a woman who's been shouting all her life. Her musical output is staggering, from her noise-punk debut with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks in 1976 to countless other bands and collaborations (Rowland Howard, Sonic Youth, Die Haut)

Her spoken-word works are no less intense. Daddy Dearest from 1988 contextualises her rage in harrowing detail. The sexual violence began at her house when she was six or seven. She left at 16 and has been flipping that script ever since. The results are not for the faint-hearted.

"My goal has always been to try to make sense of those things that nobody else was talking about," she says, "whether it was familial trauma, imbalance in all power relationships, climate change [since 1984, for the record], the prison-industrial complex when Bill Clinton was president...

Retrovirus featuring Lydia Lunch (left).Credit:Jasmine Hurst

"I am always trying to get to the root of not only my own insanity, but this global and political patriarchal insanity. I still feel like I am the woman on the mountain with a bullhorn. I do feel like the town crier. And this is no time to stop crying," she adds with a dry cackle.

The ever-present gallows humour is one weapon that signifies Lunch's refusal to surrender power alongside the abrasion of her music, the unflinching content of "a pathological f--king truth-teller", and a truly ravenous hedonism.

Her "message of resistance," says Retrovirus guitarist Weasel Walter, is about "turning abuse outward instead of inward." Just don't infer victimhood, and nobody needs to get hurt.

"Oh please. Mine was far from the worst situation," she says. "By the age of nine, I was getting vindictive. I was actually becoming very murderous and having dreams every night of murdering my family."

She started writing at 12, she says, "so that I could actually defend myself. I also realised when I started reading Selby, Miller, Foucault, de Sade when I saw the pattern [of abuse], that it never starts with the person in your house. They had to be polluted by this behaviour. So once I recognised this, not only did that makes sense to me, but then I knew what path I had to take."

The phrase The War Is Never Over is an acknowledgement of eternal vigilance for those who have been on the wrong side of power. When she defines that as "any kind of persecution or abuse or trauma or prejudice or injustice," the size of her mission these last 45 years looms into view.

"Art is a salve to the universal trauma," she says. "If it burns in you, and you have to create, other people are going to be afflicted by the need to see or hear what it is that you're doing. Because people. Burn. Deeply."

Lydia Lunch's Retrovirus is at Melbourne's Corner Hotel on Friday, February 28, then Theatre Royal in Castlemaine on Saturday, and on to the Brisbane Hotel in Hobart on March 1.

Michael Dwyer is an arts and music writer

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'This is no time to stop crying': punk's high priestess is back - The Sydney Morning Herald

What does being a mother really feel like? Clover Strouds powerhouse of a memoir gets closer than anything else I have read to answering that question. The motherhood she describes is the very antithesis of the sanitised, smiling vision we are sold in washing powder ads. There are no pastel colours here; Strouds mother-love is as raw and rare as cutting through the soft dark crimson of uncooked liver. When someone gives her new baby a stuffed toy monkey, she longs to surround him with more ancient and serious things: the Bible, The Complete Works of Shakespeare. The business of bringing a person into the world, after all, is not cute or clean or fluffy.

The book follows Stroud and her family through a tumultuous year, in which her fifth child, Lester, is born. We get a remarkable 360-degree view of many different stages of mothering, all happening at once: she lives through the passionate intensity of her first attachment with Lester, just as her eldest son, 16-year-old Jimmy, is in the process of separation, his adolescence compelling us further and further apart, once magnets, now repelled. Meanwhile her daughter Dolly is grappling with dyslexia and the onset of puberty. As Stroud battles through pregnancy, labour, breastfeeding, and meetings with the school about Jimmys weed habit, her third and fourth children, Dash and Evangeline, wheel about in a world of spilled cornflakes and imaginary cats.

Stroud was shortlisted for the Wainwright prize for nature writing for her debut memoir, The Wild Other. Her new book is nature writing, too; but this is nature as experienced from the inside. She excels in evoking the feral, instinctive forces that motherhood unleashes, which can be so difficult to explain or describe (hence the shocked refrain of new mothers: Nobody ever tells you!). And while she is acutely alive to its joys sexual, exhausting, earthy joys these are always intertwined with darkness and difficulty. Motherhood hurts, she writes. And I like to be hurt.

Childbirth itself is the ultimate expression of this heady cocktail of pleasure and pain. For Stroud, there is no question of an epidural: labour is and needs to be an extreme experience, which takes her to the brink of life and death, and feels to me like the very reason I was put on this planet. As the baby crowns, pain rips through her body and Stroud reaches down to press her clitoris. Just as being fucked so hard it hurts can feel good, this pain becomes something I recognise as clearly as I know myself. The agony of early breastfeeding, too, is offset by the pure liquid heaven hormones that course through her, which she compares to the effect of heroin. These natural processes are strong drugs, and she proudly tells us shes an addict.

This is a vision of motherhood for the (now middle-aged) MDMA generation

This is a vision of motherhood for the (now middle-aged) MDMA generation. Its not about duty, or even about juggling the demands of kids and work; mothering for Stroud has more to do with hedonism and adventure, about escape, and exploring the outer limits of human experience. Her own mother was brain damaged in a horrific riding accident when Stroud was 16: Much of my life has been about seeking strong motion both to make me feel alive and distract from the pain of existence.

As a motivation for creating new humans, this is not without its ethical problems. Stroud briskly shrugs people off when they question the practicality of having a fifth baby (I want messy), and cheerfully admits that in many ways another child is the last thing they all need. But the imperative of obliterating her own inner pain is more urgent to her than the imperative of giving time and attention to the children she already has. After all, wheres the fun in providing boring old steadfast support when you could be out there getting buzzed on oxytocin? When they grow up and write their own books, perhaps her children will tell us how her messiness felt to them.

There is no arguing, however, with the sheer force of her writing. The reader is simply swept up in her painful, wonderful world. Buy it, read it, and enjoy it for the wild ride it is but do think twice before you throw away the contraceptives.

Alice OKeeffes novel On the Up is published by Coronet. My Wild and Sleepless Nights by Clover Stroud is published by Doubleday (16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over 15.

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My Wild and Sleepless Nights by Clover Stroud review what does being a mother feel like? - The Guardian