Went To London, Took The Dog - Nina Stibbe

Why I Love Nina

I love Nina Stibbe. Love. Love. Love her. Unequivocally, absolutely and probably for all time. If I wasn’t so lazy and British, I would probably stalk her.

If you count being a reader as a defining personality trait (like me) rather than a nice hobby or a casual distraction, you will have catnip writers. The ones for whom, even though hardback books are now as much as a cheeky Nandos, you will not be able to wait for the paperback to come out. As soon as a new book is announced, you get that anticipatory thrill, because you must have it, by fair means or foul.

I have a bad, bad case of the Ninas.

I remember exactly when I first discovered her. I was driving to Worcestershire to visit a friend. This involved many horrible motorways and I put Radio 4 on to distract myself. Her first book, Love, Nina, was being serialised. I turned on mid excerpt and was instantly hooked. Later that summer we went on holiday to Rye. Once I’ve unpacked, the first thing I do in a rental house is scour the bookshelves for treasure. Love, Nina was on the shelves and while the children and Jason ate crisps and watched Jason Bourne films, I locked myself in the bedroom and devoured it.

Love, Nina is a compilation of the letters Nina wrote in 1982 at the age of 20 when she left Leicestershire and moved to London to work as a nanny. Despite having no discernible skills in that department she got the job of looking after Mary Kay Wilmers’ sons. Mary Kay Wilmers was the editor of the London Review of Books at the time, and much of the joy of the book comes from Nina’s failure to recognise many of the highbrow people who visit the house, coupled with her efforts at wrangling edible food and two small boys.

Since then Nina has gone on to write three, excellent, fictionalisations of her child and teen years, Man At The Helm, Paradise Lodge and Reasons To Be Cheerful, with a Christmas bonus of An Almost Perfect Christmas. There is also her first foray into fiction, fiction, One Day I Shall Astonish The World.

I have written about them all at great length in the past. Needless to say, I loved them.

When I was pre-approved for Went To London, Took The Dog on NetGalley, I squeaked so loudly I summoned a flurry of bats, who are now confused about why they live on a boat.

It is perfect. It charts the year that Nina turned sixty, went through a divorce and moved back to London for twelve months to figure out what to do with the new life she found herself living. To get the full joy of it, I would advise reading Love, Nina first as the two volumes bookend each other. Even without that, it’s glorious.

Part of why I love her so much is that I am from Leicester myself. Although there is ten years in age between us, so many of the places and experiences she writes about are things I recognise and relate to. I think there is something magically powerful about discovering writers who reflect your experience. I always envied people who lived in London or other fancy cities where writers flock to write about life there. It never occurred to me that anyone would want to write about Leicester.

I expect the comparison is irksome, but I cannot write about Nina in this respect without mentioning Sue Townsend, because of course, the first time I read about Leicester in a book was through Adrian Mole. The places Adrian inhabits are my places. He is also my age. Adrian and I grew up together and I love him like a brother. The same time travelling magic occurs through Stibbe’s writing. As I read her, I hear the click in the lock of memory and images surface that I haven’t thought about in years. It’s better than a madeleine and there is no need to translate. I am simply transported.

It’s not just a sense of place that links Townsend and Stibbe. The true genius of both is in their astute, clever, sharp skewering of people on the page. They have an uncanny and brilliant ability to insert the reader into instantly recognisable social situations. There are moments in all Stibbe’s books where I feel as if she has reached out and physically pulled me into the page.

She knows people and understands instinctively what is needed to build character. You never feel that any of them are thin, no matter how briefly they appear in her pages. Nor, even in the funniest descriptions do you lose sight of the sorrows and complications that sit under the skin. It’s not just Townsend I think about in these moments, there is a strong kinship with the genius of Victoria Wood. Sometimes as I read, I see Wood in my mind’s eye. In One Day I Shall Astonish The World I felt that the world was a poorer place because Wood was not there to make it into television for me. It would have been the cherry on the cake.

In Went To London, Took My Dog I thought a lot about Deborah Levy’s autobiography, The Cost of Living, which is also brilliant. Both women tackle what happens when your life changes abruptly in your fifties and sixties and begin to figure out who they want to be and how they want to achieve it. Wry, melancholy and sometimes sidesplittingly funny, these are the manuals I am choosing to help me navigate this portion of my life. It isn’t a divorce that has caused me to take stock, a death works just as well.

It is traditional for women of our age to fade into obscurity, to become colourless ghosts who only flicker into life in relation to the people around us. The expectation is that as our biologically useful life comes to an end, we find unchallenging hobbies to occupy us until we acquire grandchildren or die. Levy and Stibbe refuse this fate and their thoughts and experiences are helping me refuse mine.

Even if you’re not in this situation, there is so much to love in this latest book. Stibbe is a generous writer who unstintingly shares her experiences in a way that welcomes everyone in. She makes London feel like a village and her friends feel like people you know. The love and awe she has for her children is wonderful to read about as she is welcomed into the London they know.

But the funny. Oh, the funny. It is properly, properly funny. I have a difficult relationship with books that are badged as being hilarious. Often I read them and think that there is something wrong with me, because I don’t even crack a smile and if I am expecting funny, I finish the book feeling cheated. It might be a great book, but it will always be coloured by my inability to see the humour in it and I just can’t like it anymore. Stibbe though, has a direct connection from her type to my funny bone and it’s not just amusing funny. There is always a moment, or maybe a few in which I actually laugh out loud. It is a gift and a proper joy.

In an attempt to be a less slothful stalker, I booked a ticket to see Nina talking about Went to London, Took the Dog at Waterstones in Piccadilly on November 1st. Sadly I have been thwarted by events beyond my control and now I can’t go. So if anyone reading this is in London and wants to go to this, let me know and I can arrange to send you my ticket. I don’t want any money for it. Just go and fangirl for me.