Nina Stibbe: ‘I’m a pack animal. I’m like a dog: when I’m on my own, I feel anxious’

Nina Stibbe’s new memoir, Went to London, Took the Dog, chronicles her year spent as a “60-year-old runaway” from her marital home in Cornwall, returning to London 20 years after leaving. Accompanied by her cockapoo, Stibbe rented a room in the Kentish Town Victorian terrace of the writer Deborah Moggach – uncertain if it was a sabbatical or the start of a new chapter.

I meet Stibbe on an October afternoon at Sam’s Café, a media and literati haunt that features prominently in the book. On a leafy street in Primrose Hill, Sam’s green and yellow façade is the backdrop of a fashion shoot as I approach, the model fussed over by hair and makeup as a lackey holds an umbrella. Inside, the café is abuzz with the lunch rush. Sheepishly recalling Stibbe’s observation that “coffee is not a drink …coffee is a drug”, I follow her lead and stick to a virtuous (if unstimulating) fizzy water.

Being at Sam’s with Stibbe is like stepping into the bar in Cheers: everyone knows her name. Both her children, Alfie and Eva, and Eva’s boyfriend, called “Yousuf” in the book, work at the café part-time. Nina and I debate the works of the current artist in residence with our table neighbours: regulars Jon Snow, who is attacking a generous portion of apple pie, and Derek Hobson, who is lingering over the i. The consensus in our corner is that a Jeff Koons-inspired balloon dog pooping a water balloon – entitled “Dog Shit”, yours for £2,000 – is not the most appetite-whetting piece of the installation.

Sam’s Café is co-owned by Sam Frears, the son of the director Stephen Frears and Mary-Kay Wilmers, the co-founder and longtime editor of the London Review of Books; and by the novelist and LRB editor at large Andrew O’Hagan and his wife, Lindsey Milligan. Sam and his brother Will were Stibbe’s charges as a nanny – the subject of her breakout debut, the 2013 memoir Love, Nina, comprised of letters sent home to her sister in the early 1980s. A UK National Book Award-winner, it was adapted as a five-part BBC drama by Nick Hornby.

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Writing had always been a hobby of Stibbe’s, ”like some people collect antique salt pots”. She had been querying agents while working in academic publishing, but it wasn’t until the letters were dug out when O’Hagan was compiling anecdotes for Wilmers’s 70th birthday that Stibbe found her voice. “Once I published Love, Nina, I stopped trying to make myself sound like Edna O’Brien or Carson McCullers,” she tells me. “I wrote as me.”

On the heels of the success of Love, Nina, Stibbe published three autobiographically inspired novels: Man at the Helm (2014), a fictionalised account of life in a Leicestershire village after her parents’ divorce; Paradise Lodge (2016), in which her heroine leaves school and goes to work at a nursing home at 15; and Reasons to Be Cheerful (2019), which sees her moving to Leicester to work as a dental assistant. Stibbe’s last novel, One Day I Shall Astonish the World (2022), moved away from the strictly autobiographical to tell a story of a long female friendship. She is currently at work on a sequel, in which the protagonist’s husband unexpectedly recovers from Covid, “but she’s already imagined a whole new life for herself, so she’s moved on”, Stibbe says with a smirk. It’s “great fun to write”.

Fun to write makes Stibbe’s work fun to read. Hailed by Hellen Cullen as “one of the great comic writers of our time” in these pages, she says: “We need [comedy] more than ever.” And yet, few writers can pull it off. In a straw poll on the site formerly known as Twitter, she emerged as one of a handful of contemporary British comedic writers. Having been shortlisted for the Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction for both Man at the Helm and Paradise Lodge, she won in 2019 for Reasons to Be Cheerful – only the fourth woman to win since the prize’s inception in 2000. The book also won the Comedy Women in Print Prize, established in 2018 by the comedian Helen Lederer to address what Marian Keyes had called out as a “sexist imbalance” in the Wodehouse.

I’m a pack animal. I’m like a dog: when I’m on my own, I feel anxious

Like most good comedy, Stibbe’s humour belies more serious subjects. Went to London, Took the Dog touches on issues including the cost of living crisis and the menopause. When she realised the book would get published, Stibbe thought: “I’d better not write about all that menopause stuff any more. I shouldn’t write about all my friends’ vaginas.” But it was “actually what was going on at the moment”, so (with permission) it stayed in. The result feels bold, and important: it is rare to see the subject discussed so frankly – in literature or in life. “I know everything about my mother: all her miscarriages, her pregnancies, her abortions,” Stibbe shares. “But I didn’t know about her menopause. Nothing.”

The memoir is written in the form of diary entries. “I’ll write it Alan Bennett-style,” Stibbe told herself. “He just writes what he’s been up to.” Bennett, a friend of Wilmers’s, was featured as a regular dinner guest in Love, Nina. He was irritated by her portrayal after getting “heckled” around the neighbourhood, Stibbe tells me. Despite seeing him “every day for four years”, meanwhile, she “was never once mentioned in his diary”. The tone of Went to London, Took the Dog was also influenced by a friendship Stibbe struck up with the Australian author Meg Mason around the time she was thinking of leaving. She credits their candid correspondence for avoiding common diary pitfalls of “pouring your heart out privately or writing for the future”.

Besides her trademark humour, Stibbe’s writing arsenal includes an incredible memory for detail (her charges’ dialogue is reproduced verbatim in Love, Nina) and attention to absurdity, accentuated today by the incongruity of news feeds and social media. While fiction is best written with “morning brain”, she is constantly alert to the “little pointless details” she loves, which she jots down on the Notes app on her phone. She shares some of that morning’s observations with me, noted on the bus en route to see the Marina Abramović exhibition at the Royal Academy. “BBC News: ‘Man Creates Rock Sculpture in Cornwall While Wife Shops in Supermarket’ (love hearing about what men do while their wives are doing the food shop). Quite fancy a Snoopy Timex watch.”

The premise of Went to London, Took the Dog resembles that of Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living or Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath. While Levy and Cusk home in on their divorces, however, blink and you almost miss Stibbe’s separation. “Need to talk about possible divorce settlement, which I will do but I can’t deny that feeling sad kills my creativity,” she writes. In the same way that her courtship with the man who would become her husband, Mark Nunney (who lived next door to the Wilmers household while he looked after Claire Tomalin’s disabled son Tom), was excised from her letters in Love, Nina, the end of their relationship stays mostly between the lines.

Fortunately, the stigma around divorce – the “widespread, almost universal fear and mistrust of a family without a man” that Stibbe’s mother suffered – has dissipated in the interim. But Stibbe doesn’t love living alone. “I’m a pack animal,” she tells me. “I’m like a dog: when I’m on my own, I feel anxious.” Indeed, “learn to be alone” is one of the new year’s resolutions she takes in the book (while characteristically complaining about stale mince pies).

Stibbe is faring better on other resolutions. Cancel standing orders? Check. She has also managed to fend off mice (with potpourri pots of cloves and cinnamon) and strengthen her pelvic floor. (Although she still warns a young café patron, Sarah El Hadj, who leans in to hug her: “Don’t squeeze me too tight … I’m going to need a wee soon.”) Sarah offers us both a bite of her banana bread, testing my own carb-cutting resolution. Stibbe passes politely, but I feel I can’t burden this fresh-faced young woman with eating the massive slab in its entirety so I help myself to a silver, instantly regretting my restraint with the fizzy water.

Just as Stibbe is warm and personable as she holds court at Sam’s, on the page she offers not only comedy but camaraderie. With the world falling to pieces, we need all we can get of both. “I have endured some gruesome, untenable situations in my life,” she writes in Went to London, Took the Dog, including her “whole childhood”. These “were all made bearable”, however, “by the knowledge that one day I might tell someone about them, and maybe even laugh”.

Went to London, Took the Dog is published by Picador