Nina Stibbe’s Love, Nina (2013) was a disarming, intelligent and hugely entertaining memoir based on being a nanny for the children of Mary-Kay Wilmers, the former editor of the London Review of Books, and records encounters with Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, Karel Reisz and assorted literary others. Stibbe followed this with three buoyantly comic and successful novels based on her own life, and is about to publish a delightful fourth, One Day I Shall Astonish the World, her first attempt at fiction with no autobiographical strings attached, about a bumpy friendship between dissimilar women. She is 60 and lives in Cornwall with her husband and two grownup children.
Your new novel made me laugh out loud. Are you good at cheering yourself up?
I’m not bad at laughing at awful things. I grew up with four close siblings and we laughed at everything. Once, when Mum had gone off for a day to have an operation, we brought the horse inside and it made a mess and broke some furniture – and Mum was furious with us, so furious she burst into tears which just made us howl laughing and then made her laugh. Dad died recently and I accidentally played his funeral music in hospital while he was dying. We were talking about what music he might like and I went on Spotify and started playing his death music – and then I thought: poor man, he’ll think he’s already dead. It was Schubert’s moving String Quintet in C major.
