The Red of my Blood: A Death and Life Story

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Nell was the founder of the vintage-style Giffords Circus, while Stroud is a journalist and the author of the startlingly honest memoirs The Wild Other and My Wild and Sleepless Nights. The Red of My Blood, another breathtaking deep dive into her world, is her third book and, while very much about how life feels, it is also an exploration of death, a tribute to Nell and a howl of love and rage. It is an elegy of outstanding beauty to an extraordinary woman, written by her equally idiosyncratic younger sister.

Clover's sister was given at least five, probably ten years to live after battling breast cancer. Ten days later, she was dead. Clover Stroud's sister died suddenly at the age of forty-six, just a few weeks before Christmas. Clover, author, journalist and mother of five finds her world torn apart. While there's many things about Clover's grief that is unique to her, there's so much that hit my heart. So many experiences, feelings, thoughts, and visions I could write as my own. I have three sisters. One I grieve for, two I grieve with. We all grieve the same person, our sister, Danielle, but that grief looks very different between the three of us.A couple of years before her sister Nell died from breast cancer at the age of 46, Clover Stroud was at a party. Another guest was asking about her family. Did she work with her sister? “No,” replied Stroud. “I am the one without the circus, the one with all the children who writes about the way life feels.”

A few weeks before Christmas, Clover's sister died of breast cancer, aged forty-six. Just days before, she had been given years to live. Her sudden death split Clover's life apart. The Red of My Blood charts Clover's fearless passage through the first year after her sister's death. It is a book about what life feels like when death interrupts it, and about bearing the unbearable and describing an experience that seems beyond words. Lyrical, hopeful, it is also about the magical way in which death and life exist so vividly beside one another, and the wonder of being human.

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Having lost (I dislike this term a lot), my own sister last year, hearing Clover's story on Happy Place Podcast with Fearne Cotton, I knew had to read this book. I appreciate that we don't see her sister as a mother, or a daughter, or even as a friend. This is sibling grief. Sister to sister. The immediate aftermath, the 7-day milestone, the 'I can't imagine your pain, I can't imagine life without my sister' condolences. The searching, the blurred edges. The not wanting to wake up to one more day, the wanting to live as vibrant as possible. The contradictions, the hurt, the confusion, the love.