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

The heir to Sue Townsend and author of hit book ‘Love, Nina’ is back with more comic and candid snapshots of her personal life. She talks to Nick Duerden about her fear of loneliness, hanging out with Nick Hornby, and why it’s never too late to make a change

‘It’s definitely uncomfortable to be quite so candid’ (supplied)

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.