Nina Stibbe on her new memoir Went to London, Took the Dog: ‘Everyone’s vagina is in there’

Nina Stibbe lacks confidence. Her hilarious first book, 2013’s memoir Love, Nina, was critically acclaimed (and turned into a BBC series starring Faye Marsay and Helen Bonham Carter); her comic novels – from the Lizzie Vogel series with the award-winning Reasons to Be Cheerful to last year’s One Day I Shall Astonish the World – have seen her hailed heir to Sue Townsend (and not just because they are both from Leicester). But she still has, as she describes it, a “jolly sort of low self-esteem”. 

“I’m not sad-lacking-confidence,” she tells me. “I’m not sort of skulking around.” 

She thinks it’s because she is from the black sheep branch of a family. Stibbe grew up in a single-parent household in rural Leicestershire and “my mum was disapproved of and naughty and all the rest of the family were proper and decent. And then I left school at 15 with not a single O-level to my name. Then I scraped into Thames Poly. Since then I’ve always mixed with people who are brilliant and accomplished and I just don’t feel entirely equal to them a lot of the time.” 

When she recently met a potential new agent, the high-powered Felicity Blunt, sister of actor Emily and wife of Stanley Tucci, she felt unworthy of such impressive representation and asked “But am I all right for you, though?”. Blunt, quite rightly, chided her. 

“I don’t have imposter syndrome but I just thought ‘Do I belong in such esteemed company?’” 

But surely that’s exactly what imposter syndrome is? She starts laughing. “Is it? I don’t even f**king know what imposter syndrome is! That’s how bad I am.” 

We are talking on the phone, plans for a face-to-face meeting having been scuppered by a train strike. This is disappointing, for me at least, because Stibbe is charming, chatty and as funny in person as in print. 

“I’m in London and I’m sitting in the downstairs room of Sam’s Cafe [a venue that features frequently in her new book],” she says. “I came and met my son, a student, for lunch and my daughter’s working here and then I thought ‘You know what, I can’t be bothered to go and find a Lime bike and go to where I’m staying [to do the interview]. I think I’ll just ask if I can come down here.” 

This October, Stibbe published her second memoir, Went to London, Took the Dog. Like the first, it is a story about her time living in London. Love, Nina, made up of letters sent to her sister, was about Stibbe leaving Leicestershire in 1982 as a naive 20-year-old to take up a job in Camden as a nanny for the editor and journalist Mary-Kay Wilmers. It was quirky, uplifting and frequently laugh-out-loud funny. The new book is a diary of the 12 months from last March to this March, during the collapse of her marriage. It is still funny, but now Stibbe is older and wiser the tone is different entirely.

It doesn’t detail why the marriage is in trouble. All the reader knows is that after two decades living in Cornwall, she is now in London and, initially at least, somewhat daunted by the prospect. There’s no real narrative but the underlying themes are of ageing and facing up to the prospect of a life quite different to the one she had imagined. 

Stibbe is still not actually divorced “but I think I probably shouldn’t talk about it because it’s not nice for him or my kids”, she tells me. She and her husband wed only five years ago but had been together for decades.

Amid all the drollery – “Don’t know which I like least: people recommending meditation, or having conspiracy theory tendencies” – there is an undertow of sadness and regret and there are sentences that bring the reader up short. At one point she writes: “haven’t cried for over forty-eight hours”. 

Later: “And I have never been judgemental about other people ending a marriage, far from it. Now it’s me, though, I feel guilty. It’s so inconvenient, complicated and sad. It drags others down and it feels selfish and weak to not just plod on.” There’s a real sense of the fragility of things. 

In Love, Nina, much of the humour derived from Stibbe finding herself at the heart of literary London, mixing with the likes of Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett while having absolutely no clue who they were. She asked Miller if he was an opera singer, and thought Bennett used to be in Coronation Street. 

Now, after the success of that book and her subsequent works, she is herself a member of the literary establishment.  

She spends the year recorded in Went to London lodging with Tulip Fever novelist Deborah Moggach. She hangs out with the authors Cathy Rentzenbrink, Meg Mason and Nick Hornby (who adapted Love, Nina for TV in 2016). She bumps into Jojo Moyes and Frears and Bennett.  

But the book is also filled with everyday observations – “The grapefruit soap I bought myself as a moving-in gift smells of pork” – and trips to her local launderette – “Today Bubbles opened late: 10.30. Abdul blamed high pollen count, wisteria dust, and something on the news” – and entries about what she’s eating: “Debby defrosted a Charlie Bigham’s fish pie on the radiator for dinner.” 

It is, she says, a straightforward account of her days. 

“I didn’t set out to write it for publication so the first few months were very pure and unselfconscious. I was just writing for me because I knew I’d want to remember this period.” Then when her editor suggested publishing it, Stibbe wondered about retrospectively censoring some entries. She decided against it. “I was writing about my and my friends’ gyno-urinary-vaginal issues – everyone’s vagina is in there – so I thought ‘OK, do I take out all the vaginas and the prolapses?’ And then I thought, ‘No, I’m going to talk about women’s menopausal health and to hell with it.’” 

Thus we learn that her friend Fiona is at her wits’ end “with her bladder and womb falling out of her vagina every time she gets up from a chair”. And that another friend suffering from “atrophied vagina” blames her husband’s erectile dysfunction because “before that he just ‘shoved it in once a fortnight and that kept it open for business’”.

Is she worried about the reaction from people she mentions but about whom she has been, let’s say “ambivalent”? For example, she refers to having “dodged Lionel Shriver for a quiet life” at an event and later makes an excuse to avoid a “Lionel Shriver dinner”. “That’s a problem but I think she thrives on that so I don’t feel like I’m punching down,” she says. “I don’t think I’ve been too horrible about her.” 

She reports a friend’s remark about “Alan Bennett thinking teachers touching up teenage boys is funny”. Won’t he be upset? “I happen to know that Bennett slightly regrets his national treasure identity,” she says. “He would love to be known for a sex scandal, he really would. So, I think I’ve done him a favour. Yet again, I’ve put him on the map.” 

Evident throughout the book is her delight in her two children, Alfie and Eva. Describing swimming with them she writes: “I cannot describe the joyful amusement of seeing them ahead of me kicking froggy legs and looking accomplished and fabulous and just completely beautiful. If you need a perk-up, go swimming with your kids”. 

They both live in London and are the main reason Stibbe likes spending time there. “I can’t bear to be so far away from them. Even though they’re 20 and 22, it’s too far away. 

“When I come to London, it’s so great to be back with them. Yesterday, Alfie and I were cycling from Upper Street to Primrose Hill in the twilight and I was almost crying with joy. There’s something about doing stuff and being alive and the wind in your hair – it just felt so lovely.” 

By the end of Went to London, Stibbe seems to have found an acceptance of this new stage of her life. The melancholy, regretful entries have petered out. On one of her final nights, she is ridiculously thrilled to have beaten Nick Hornby’s team in a pub quiz by virtue of knowing the name of the poison derived from foxgloves and she rhapsodises about “the fun of it”.  She has, she declares, in her very last entry “learned to be alone”. 

Talking to her, she certainly sounds happier than when she started writing the book. “Yes,” she says simply. “I am.” 

Went to London, Took the Dog is published by Picador (£16.99)