‘We didn’t half have a laugh’: writers Nina Stibbe and Deborah Moggach on living together, breakups and needy cockapoos

Stibbe’s warm and witty new book describes the year she lodged with Moggach, the author of Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

The pretty Victorian house in Kentish Town is painted saffron yellow with a flight of steep steps leading up to its front door and black iron railings, and is in a cul-de-sac of the secretive sort London does so well. I am about to meet Nina Stibbe, although this is not where she lives; it is the house of the writer Deborah Moggach (about which more in a moment). Stibbe is hanging out in Moggach’s sitting room, which is filled with paintings, books and rugs, and I greet her with an unplanned hug, helplessly under the illusion – probably like most of her readers – that she is an old friend. I find it unaccountable, I tell her, that we have never met face to face.

The best introduction to Nina Stibbe, for anyone yet to come across her, is her own: Love, Nina (2014) was based on letters written to her sister about life in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town as nanny to the sons of Mary-Kay Wilmers, then editor of the London Review of Books. The book charmed because of its fresh, entertaining and not-in-the-slightest awed take on celebrated neighbours – Alan Bennett, Claire Tomalin, Karel Reisz and others – and became a BBC series in 2016. But the best thing about the book was Stibbe herself. She grew up in rural Leicestershire and was (and is) uncommonly nice and funny. Part of the satisfaction of reading her was the realisation that, on the quiet, she was becoming an ace writer herself – a Camden Town Cinderella, destined for the literary ball.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/ipYtkX4