Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding is one of the few diaries I’ve had the opportunity to peek into (even though it was fictional), but reading the inside story of other people’s lives is probably why I enjoy memoirs and biographies so much.

I’ve just finished reading Went To London, Took The Dog: The Diary of a 60-Year-Old Runaway by British writer Nina Stibbe. While not quite as scintillating as Bridget Jones, this non-fiction story still offers a fascinating encapsulated peek into one year in the life of a menopausal female author trying out a new life.

Following a marriage breakup, Stibbe was confronted with having to reinvent her life. She considered leaving her Cornwall home and returning to live in London, England. Faced with the challenges and exorbitant costs associated with such a relocation, she decided to do a practice run by moving into the home of a fellow writer who offered her a room for a year.

The writer Stibbe had the amazing good fortune to live with was Deborah Moggach, author of These Foolish Things which was rebranded as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I read the original book (These Foolish Things) twice before the movie was ever released and can vouch for the book being even better than the movie, which is usually the case in an adaptation.

Stibbe has access to and is friends with many famous names in British literary circles. When you’re a famous author living with another famous author, it is impossible not to name-drop and Stibbe indulges us thoroughly. Fortunately, the author provides a list of the cast of characters at the beginning of the book which helps provide context and I did have to refer to it several times to clarify who was who. The diary is written in point-form style summarizing her daily activities, conversations, and observations.

Most of her lady friends are also menopausal and their challenges with the various bodily changes will be recognizable to baby boomer women. Her wry observations and the experiences of her friends are funny and highly relatable.

If you own a dog or any kind of pet for that matter, you will appreciate her attachment to her dog, Peggy, and understand a pet’s importance in our later years. This book was a fast read and thoroughly enjoyable. I highly recommend it and hope you find it uplifts you as much as it did me.

These obscure British authors are often hard to find in local bookstores or libraries, so I downloaded Went To London, Took The Dog from Amazon onto Kindle and read it on my iPad.

Déjà Vu

Because I enjoyed Went To London, Took The Dog so much, I searched out other books by Stibbe and found Love Nina, A Nanny Writes Home at my local library. After downloading and reading a few pages, I realized I had read this book before, several years ago. It’s a compilation of letters written forty years earlier in the same bullet style by Stibbe to her sister when the author was working as a nanny for Mary-Kaye Wilmers, former Editor at the London Review of Books.

Stibbe describes her life as a nanny to Wilmer’s two boys, Sam and Will who are eight and ten years old when she moves into their home in 1982. The boys are exceptionally precocious and their humour qualifies them as minor stars of the first book. No one does irony better than the British, even the children. Both appear as grown men in the later Went To London book. Looking back on the author’s life as a young woman in her early twenties living in a literary community in London, her writing skill and sense of humour were already evident back then.

Even though I’d read Love Nina several years ago, I loved it all over again. In fact, now that I’ve refreshed my memory of the characters as they were forty years earlier, I plan to re-read the second book as well. So, double your pleasure, double your fun; both books are equally entertaining and the humour is a nice respite from the stress of the real world. I highly recommend them both.

If you are unable to obtain Went To London, Took The Dog, A Diary, or Love Nina, A Nanny Writes Home by Nina Stibbe, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach, or Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, please click on the book title to have them delivered directly to your tablet or front door from Amazon. (Disclosure: I may receive a teeny, tiny commission. Thank you.)