The first time Nina Stibbe lived in London she was 20 years old, fresh from rural Leicestershire and pitched into working as a nanny in one of the starriest literary streets in Primrose Hill. Her boss, Mary-Kay Wilmers, was then deputy editor of the London Review of Books, and neighbours popping in for a metaphorical cup of sugar included Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Claire Tomalin, Michael Frayn and Deborah Moggach. Stibbe watched it all wide-eyed and reported back to her sister in a series of letters that formed the basis for her 2013 bestseller, Love, Nina.
Now Stibbe is back, aged 60, after decades of family living in deepest Cornwall. This time she is lodging with Moggach, who has since moved around the corner to Camden. She also has her beloved cockapoo Peggy with her, as well as a literary reputation of her own. Love, Nina was followed by four bestselling novels, all defined by Stibbe’s wry voice as an absurdist chronicler of a world both baffling and extraordinary.
Stibbe’s own stardom makes this diary of the grown-up gap year she spent in London between 2022 and early 2023 a high-risk enterprise. It was funny in Love, Nina when she thought that Alan Bennett had been in Coronation Street or that Jonathan Miller was an opera singer. But can the studied naivety work when Nick Hornby is in the local pub quiz team and evenings are spent with a landlady who periodically has to dash off to attend to the latest performance of her hit play?
Yes, it turns out – because life is as baffling at 60 as it ever was at 20. Maybe more so. It gradually emerges that Stibbe is in London on a trial separation from her husband. We don’t get the details, but there’s a persistent background ache to all the London larkiness, not least when Stibbe visits Cornwall to host a family Christmas even though that family has changed beyond all recognition.
Then there are the frailties of the ageing female body. Stibbe battles stress incontinence to such a degree that she takes to blaming small pools of urine on any passing dog (not Peggy, though, who can do no wrong, despite sounding a bit of a pain). There is the irony, too, of going on HRT just as the national shortage begins to bite. In one particularly fierce nightmare, Stibbe dreams that Moggach’s house is burgled by thieves who ignore the priceless paintings on the walls and go for the lodger’s oestrogen patches instead.
Stibbe’s young adult children live nearby in London, which allows her to measure how far she has come now that they are at the age that she was in Love, Nina. Her skinny jeans mortify them, while she finds herself flummoxed by the bands they queue to see, including “Trash Baby”. There is also a comic chorus of female friends who swap opinions on everything from middle-aged sexting to identifying the precise moment at which Tom Cruise appeared to morph into Sandi Toksvig. You do wonder, actually, whether these friends don’t mind being named along with a mortifying set of vulnerabilities – drink problems, piles, a boyfriend who will keep on saying “vulva” in public all the time. Even Mary-Kay Wilmers is slightly derided for her heavy-handed way with a Clinique Chubby Stick. But perhaps Stibbe is simply showing us that, at 60, she has finally learned to not worry about what people think of her.
The challenge of using the diary format for auto-fiction is always about pace and structure. How do you stop it becoming just one thing after another? Although there’s a lot of repetitive detail, Stibbe uses the discipline of her time-stamped sabbatical as a way of injecting propulsion, if not exactly urgency, into her narrative. At the end of this lovely, funny-sad book, she slips out of the house at dawn (she hates goodbyes) and drives off to Cornwall to find out what the rest of her life has in store. Her time away, though, has not been wasted. She reports, in no particular order, that she has finished Ulysses, learned how to be alone, started to go grey, and in the time-honoured way of those well into middle age, now reads with her bad eye clamped shut.
• Went to London, Took the Dog: a Diary by Nina Stibbe is published by Pan Macmillan (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
