Olivia: Jackson, I'm giving you a challenge. Review Laura Clery's book Idiots in exactly five words. Jackson: Okay. "My vagina is a clown car." Olivia: Perfect. Mine is: "Never trust a hippie midwife." Jackson: Wow, that is an incredibly specific and slightly alarming takeaway. I'm both terrified and intrigued. A book that can inspire both of those reviews must be something special. Olivia: It is. We're diving into Idiots: Marriage, Motherhood, Milk & Mistakes by Laura Clery. And to understand this book, you have to know who she is. She's not a traditional memoirist; she's a massive internet comedian and content creator with millions of followers. Her entire brand is built on a kind of radical, unfiltered honesty that most people would run from. Jackson: That makes so much sense. Because reading it, you feel like you're scrolling through the most chaotic, unhinged, but deeply honest private social media feed in the world. It's not just a book; it's a performance of vulnerability. Olivia: Exactly. And it's been both widely acclaimed and pretty polarizing for that reason. It was even nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award. Readers either find her fearless honesty incredibly liberating or... a bit much. Jackson: I can see why. She goes to places that are deeply uncomfortable. But let's start with the place that seems to be the most physically chaotic part of her story: childbirth.

Olivia: Right. So, have you ever heard of a "birth plan"? People map out exactly how they want their delivery to go—music, lighting, no medication... Jackson: Oh, yeah. It’s the ultimate attempt to impose order on the most chaotic event imaginable. I’m guessing Laura Clery’s birth plan didn’t exactly go… to plan? Olivia: That is the understatement of the century. For her first child, Alfie, she gets inspired by a documentary and decides she wants a natural home water birth. She fires her OB-GYN and hires a midwife named Maude. Jackson: Maude. Even the name sounds… earthy. Let me guess, lots of crystals and patchouli? Olivia: You are not far off. Maude’s office is described as "modern hippie," with tie-dye and a distinct lack of modern medical equipment. Stephen, her husband, is immediately skeptical. But Laura is all in. The turning point comes during a 3D scan with her old OB-GYN, who warns them the baby is measuring very large and strongly suggests a hospital birth. Jackson: A pretty standard medical concern. What does Maude the Midwife say? Olivia: She dismisses it completely. And this is the part that is just unbelievable. She pulls out these two metal rods—dowsing rods—and uses her "magical power of dowsing" to declare the baby is the perfect size. Jackson: Hold on. Dowsing? Like for finding water in a desert? She used medieval water-finding magic to determine the size of a human baby? Olivia: That's the one. Stephen is, understandably, freaking out. He starts digging around online and finds a single, one-star Yelp review for Maude. Jackson: What does a one-star Yelp review for a midwife even say? "Delivery was late, baby was cold"? Olivia: It was far, far worse. The review was from a couple whose baby was born not breathing and suffered brain damage. The reason? The baby was over 11 pounds with the cord wrapped around his neck. The parents had repeatedly told Maude they were concerned about the baby's size, and she had dismissed them every time. Jackson: Oh my god. That is horrifying. That Yelp review might have literally saved their child's life. Olivia: It did. They fired Maude immediately and went back to the hospital. It’s such a powerful story, and it supports one of the book's key quotes, which is paraphrased from that Yelp review: "Never let any ‘expert’ have more power than your intuition." Jackson: That’s a huge lesson. We're so conditioned to defer to authority, whether it's a doctor or a midwife with dowsing rods. But that little voice in your gut—or in this case, your husband's frantic Googling—is there for a reason. Olivia: And the chaos doesn't stop there. Even in the hospital, Alfie's birth ends up involving a vacuum extraction. Then for her second child, Penelope, she has this incredibly painful, unmedicated birth where she's screaming her safe word, "BALLSACK," at the top of her lungs, but the anesthesiologist is busy. Jackson: BALLSACK? That’s a bold choice for a safe word. Olivia: She says it was the most ridiculous word she could think of. The birth is messy and raw—she shits and pisses everywhere, as she graphically describes—but she comes out of it with this profound realization. She says, "This backbreaking birth… really did teach me that I am capable of overcoming anything. And that just when I think I can’t go on… It turns out I motherfucking can!" Jackson: It's fascinating how she finds empowerment in the most humiliating and painful moments. She's not just telling gross-out stories for shock value. She's reframing them as moments of incredible strength. Olivia: That's the core of it. She talks about the "fourth trimester," the brutal postpartum period, with the same unflinching honesty. She shares a friend's story about perineal tearing feeling like "a thousand tiny evil elves with a dagger in each little hand" stabbing your vagina. Jackson: That is a disturbingly vivid image that I will never forget. Olivia: But it's that honesty that prepares you. She argues that by hiding the ugly truth, we set women up for failure and shame when their experience isn't the glowing, beautiful one they see on Instagram. She’s waging a war on the curated, sanitized version of motherhood. Jackson: Okay, so she dodged a bullet with the birth and found strength in the physical crucible of postpartum. But the book gets even more intense when she turns that same unflinching lens on her marriage. It feels like if childbirth is a physical trial, her marriage is the emotional one.

Olivia: Absolutely. She opens the chapter on her marriage with the bold, all-caps statement: "THERE IS NO PERFECT RELATIONSHIP." And she spends the rest of the chapter proving it in excruciating, and sometimes hilarious, detail. Jackson: Where does she start? What’s the inciting incident for the marital chaos? Olivia: It’s a fight over a PopSocket. Jackson: A PopSocket? The little plastic circle you stick on the back of your phone? That’s what nearly breaks them? Olivia: It’s the trigger, not the cause. The setup is crucial. They're a few weeks postpartum with their second child, her mom is staying with them, and they're both exhausted. They have a rule: no work talk after 8 PM. But one night, Stephen, her husband, breaks the rule to talk about a brand deal for a PopSocket. Jackson: A classic work-from-home couple problem. The lines get blurry. Olivia: Exactly. The conversation escalates. Laura wants to resolve it immediately, but Stephen needs space. He shuts down and gives her the silent treatment. And this is where the past trauma comes roaring in. For Laura, his silence triggers a deep-seated fear of abandonment. For Stephen, her pressing him for a resolution triggers his own childhood trauma of feeling ganged up on. Jackson: So the PopSocket isn't the issue at all. It’s just the key that unlocks these two, much deeper, wounds. That's incredibly relatable, how a tiny, stupid thing can unleash a hurricane of past pain. Olivia: Precisely. And this is where her background with addiction becomes so important. In recovery, you learn to identify your own part in a conflict. She realizes her panic and his withdrawal are two sides of the same dysfunctional coin. But it gets darker. She reveals stories from earlier in their relationship that she was too scared to tell in her first book. Jackson: This is where the book gets really raw, right? She talks about infidelity and relapse. Olivia: Yes. There's a story she calls "The German Hacker Incident." Early in their relationship, while she was newly sober and feeling insecure, she snooped through Stephen's emails and found flirtatious messages with a woman in Germany. Jackson: Oh no. The classic insecurity-fueled deep dive. A modern-day horror story. Olivia: She confronts him, and he claims he was hacked by a German hacker. It's such a flimsy, ridiculous lie. They break up, but he's persistent and they end up in couples therapy. This is where the theme of forgiveness starts to take root. Jackson: But it’s not just his issues, right? She’s equally honest about her own destructive behavior. Olivia: Completely. She admits that during another period of insecurity, she relapsed on cocaine, got into his email again, and sent a provocative message from his account to a female colleague of his. She owns her part in the chaos. The relationship is a minefield of their shared and individual traumas. The climax of this is when Stephen, after a car accident, gets addicted to painkillers and has an affair. Jackson: Wow. That's the kind of betrayal that ends most relationships for good. How do they possibly come back from that? Olivia: Through a process she describes as brutal honesty and radical forgiveness. He comes clean, he goes to rehab, and they separate for a while. But they choose to fight for the relationship. This leads to one of the most profound moments of wisdom in the book, which she gets from a 98-year-old neighbor named Anne. Jackson: Saint Anne, the guru from the introduction! What was her secret? Olivia: Laura asks her the secret to her nearly fifty-year relationship. Anne says, "I liked the man he WAS, not the man I was going to make him into." Jackson: That hits hard. It’s the opposite of the romantic-comedy trope where you're supposed to "fix" or "complete" each other. It’s about radical acceptance of who the person is, flaws and all. Olivia: It's a huge shift for Laura. She realizes she has to stop trying to change Stephen, and he has to do the same for her. She develops a mantra: "It’s him or something better." It’s not a threat, but a recognition of her own self-worth. She tells him, "I do not need you, Stephen. I want you." That shift from codependent need to conscious choice is what saves them.

Jackson: After all this chaos—the dowsing rods, the PopSocket, the affair, the poop stories—what's the actual takeaway? Is the message just "life is messy, hang in there"? Olivia: I think it goes deeper. Clery's argument isn't just that life is messy, but that radical vulnerability is a kind of superpower. In our culture, we're taught to hide the ugly parts, to curate our lives for public consumption. Shame thrives in silence. Jackson: And she's doing the exact opposite. She's dragging all the shame out into the sunlight and, by laughing at it, she kind of neutralizes it. Olivia: She completely dismantles it. By sharing the story of accidentally shitting herself after taking too many laxatives postpartum, or her husband's affair, she's not just being shocking. She’s saying, "This is part of the human experience. It’s painful and absurd, but it doesn’t have to break you. It doesn’t have to define you." Jackson: And the fact that the book is so popular, that it was nominated for awards despite its controversial content, suggests there's a deep, collective hunger for that kind of honesty. We're tired of the perfect, filtered version of life. Olivia: We're starving for it. She proves that connection isn't built on our shared perfection; it's built on our shared imperfections. The title itself, Idiots, is a reclamation. It’s saying we’re all idiots in some way, making mistakes and fumbling through. And in that shared idiocy, we can find community, strength, and a whole lot of laughter. Jackson: It's a powerful reframe. The things we're most ashamed of might actually be the things that connect us most deeply to other people. Olivia: Exactly. It makes you wonder, what's the one 'ugly' story in our own lives that we're too afraid to tell, and what power might we unlock if we did? Jackson: That is a question to sit with. For anyone listening who feels a connection to this idea of radical honesty, we’d love to hear your thoughts. You can always find us on our social channels and join the conversation. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.