Nina Stibbe on marriage breakup, dodgy bladders, and starting again at 60

Nina Stibbe’s new book, a memoir titled Went to London, Took the Dog, comes, she says, with a warning for the sensitive reader: “It does feature rather a lot of vaginas.” Why is this? I ask her. “Well,” she shrugs, “every other woman over the age of 50 that I hang around with seems to have an atrophied vagina. I said to my mum that she probably has one, too. That stabbing feeling you get, I told her: it’s an atrophied vagina.” She grins. “My mum wasn’t very happy with me discussing her vagina in my diary, but my argument was: ‘Everyone else’s is in it, including mine, so why not yours?’”

Went to London, Took the Dog charts a year in the life of Stibbe (plus her dog Peggy), during which she leaves the family home in Cornwall, and her husband of two decades, for a fresh start aged 60. Moving into the spare room of her friend, the writer Deborah Moggach, in Kentish Town, she works sporadically on a novel-in-progress, eats biscuits, and endures a succession of mini crises of confidence. Ultimately, she finds solace by slotting herself into the capital’s bustling literary circles, which prove very welcoming indeed.

In the 10 years since her first book, the memoir Love, Nina– which recounts her time in Camden, at the age of 20, working as a nanny while living with Mary-Kay Wilmers, then the editor of the London Review of Books – Stibbe seems to have befriended every writer of significance at work today. If she isn’t having lunch with one of them, then she’s attending the book launch of another, or sharing the stage with yet another at a book event. Many are likely drawn to her, you fancy, for the kind of attributes that literary circles have always adored: candour, and humour.

If she flaunted both of these qualities in that first book, then she does so even more in her latest. A diary, by its very nature, is an intimate thing. Why write one if you’re going to leave so much out? It is also, of course, private. But when you’re a writer as gifted as Stibbe, then the private does have a habit of becoming public. She has always kept one, but it was only halfway through the most recent instalment, which she’d started in 2021, that she realised it might end up in bookshops. Her editor pointed out that it had been 10 years since Love, Nina, and that were she to publish a sequel of sorts now – ie her diary – there’d be a nice symmetry to it.

“She reminded me that Love, Nina was about me living with a literary person in London in my early twenties, and that now I was back here again, at 60, living with another literary type.”

So she sought permission from everyone she had mentioned in it so far, and, assuring herself that no one would be offended – including her ex-husband, who features only by deliberately oblique reference – she signed the deal. From that point, she began to write with added purpose, “which was awkward”, she admits, “because Debby [Moggach] started to think I was making things happen just so I’d have something interesting to say. I’d nick some of her biscuits in the hope she’d tell me off, for example, or suggest we ride electric scooters at night. But Debby’s not easily fooled.”

The result is a highly compelling account of the daily life of a newly single woman, in which the mundane (what Stibbe is having for dinner; the coat she wears in winter) rubs up against the profound (the worrisome spectre of a much quieter life lived largely alone).

When she goes to see the US rapper A$AP Rocky with her 19-year-old son, Alf, “I do pelvic-floor exercises all during his set.” Elsewhere: “God, my children [she has a 23-year-old daughter, Eva, while Alf is now 21] do drink a lot of alcohol. I don’t mean to be all Julie Myerson but they just do.” Later, about a friend: “Fiona now can’t even stand up from sitting without everything falling out of her vagina. She has to shove everything back in before she is able to go to the toilet.” A paragraph later she’s bemoaning the fact that “the blue enamel paint is peeling on that cafetière I bought. Seems a bit soon to be deteriorating to this extent.”

She writes it all with such deft skill – and such a pointed nib – that a book about separation and ageing emerges as a masterpiece of everyday comic pathos.

“It’s definitely uncomfortable to be quite so candid,” she concedes, “but I realised that I hadn’t read very many memoirs about women over the age of 50 having to pluck their moustaches or peeing themselves every time they run for the bus, and so I just thought: ‘F*** it, I’ll do it myself.’”

When I ask if she considers it a sad book, she frowns. “I don’t know... No, no. I don’t think it is. What I think it acknowledges is that we all live for a long time. My mum used to say to me that everything’s a phase, and she’s right. I ended a perfectly alright marriage because I just didn’t think I could do it any more, even though I remain incredibly fond of my ex-husband, who’s just lovely. But phases do end, and change is possible.”

She’s been officially single now for coming up to 18 months. “I think I’m starting to settle into it. I’ve made friends with the next-door neighbour, for example, even though we’ve very little in common. I don’t like being home alone very much, so when my neighbour goes away – she went to Brighton just the other day – I can feel a bit... a bit fragile.”

There’s a moment’s silence, then: “Sorry, what were we talking about?”

Love, Nina, published just after she had turned 50, changed Stibbe’s life in a stroke. As well as being a bestseller and an award winner, it was later developed into a series for television starring Helena Bonham Carter. Hailed the true heir to Sue Townsend, Stibbe went on to write five further novels of comparable wit and wisdom. “I always thought I’d end up writing in life, but I was just too lazy to do anything about it in my twenties and thirties – and forties,” she says. “Shame I was so lazy, really.”

In the new memoir, when not mulling on all things gynaecological, she does fret an awful lot about being lonely on the cusp of old age, despite the proliferation of writers willing to take her out and keep her occupied. She swims in ponds with Cathy Rentzenbrink, competes in pub quizzes with Nick Hornby, and frequents the north London café of Sam Frears – son of film director Stephen – for whom she used to babysit several decades ago. Her bus pass sees a lot of action.

“Well, I’m working hard to keep even the prospect of loneliness at bay,” she says. She tells me that, no, she isn’t dating – cannot quite summon up the necessary energy for it. “Besides, I’ve probably written myself out of the market with this new book, haven’t I? I’m almost always wetting myself, and having to wear Tena Lady pants...” She sighs. “Women, when they get to a certain age... it’s really demoralising and disheartening to know that you’re not shaggable any more. You’re sort of disintegrating, and you smell a bit of fish. But you just have to deal with it.”

Her year in London was up when Moggach needed the spare room for someone else, and Stibbe decided that, despite being a bestselling author, she couldn’t afford “anywhere else half-decent in the city because it’s all so bloody expensive”. And so she has moved back to Cornwall, and currently rents a place overlooking the harbour. She and her ex-husband are on cordial terms, and she is happy, she says, but still she worries. “Sometimes I do think to myself: ‘F***, am I really going to live on my own and eat cheese and biscuits every night for the rest of my life?’ I do hope not.”

One unexpected consequence of writing her latest book is that people are now coming to her for advice. Doing as she has done, and striking out alone at 60, takes guts. It has made her a quietly inspirational figure. She sort of likes this, a little.

“Yes, but I can only talk about my own experiences, and how they’ve benefited me,” she says, allowing her gaze to wander to the window, and through it towards the busy road beyond. When she looks back, she’s smiling with both eyes. “But I definitely feel more grown up now because of – you know, because of all this, all the changes I’ve made. And that has to be a good thing, right?”

‘Went to London, Took the Dog’ is published by Picador