My Mum’s Growing Down

What do you do if your mum loves nothing better than complaining in restaurants and calling museum guards fruit bats? What if she makes you hold hands in the cinema, won’t stop playing on the PlayStation, has custard on her dress and insists on you telling her a bedtime story? The little boy that describes his creative, warm and often embarrassing mum is (despite being frequently mortified at her childlike ways), the lucky child of a mum that loves him fiercely and kindly. So what if she wears embarrassing hippy smocks to school on parent’s evening and makes herself sick from eating too much cake at parties?

In this vibrant, hilarious and touching book of well-crafted and original poems, Laura Dockrill’s experience as a performance poet shines through. Loosely based on her own fantastic, larger-than-life mum, Dockrill’s poems are full of love for a modern woman that refuses to be pigeonholed into a dull stereotype. It’s also a truly lovely book that celebrates the strength of a single parent, single child family and an upbeat reminder that, when the world outside is occasionally sad and dark, mums know that the good stuff is in you.