What does it mean to start again at sixty? Nina Stibbe is surprised to find herself asking this question as she leaves married life behind in Cornwall and heads back to London after twenty years away for what she calls ‘a year-long sabbatical’.
The appreciation of the book may provide something of a Rorschach test: If you are already a Stibbe enthusiast, you will probably be charmed by her writerly life, her dashing about to book festivals, her interactions with her many famous friends ... While some of these observations may seem trivial, I will confess that more than a few of them have wormed their way into my brain ... If you are looking for intimate reflections on marriage at late-mid-life, you might want to reach for a diary of a different sort.
Stibbe’s unique brand of melancholic humour would win over the bitterest churl ... Some of the funniest observations come from Stibbe’s memory. I laughed out loud at the boyfriend who had sensitive hair follicles, and the time her brother accidentally said 'Take care' to their grandmother, 'and she went full bitch on him' ...
Her diary is not only observationally acute but bursting with philosophical, psychological and biological enquiry.
Although there’s a lot of repetitive detail, Stibbe uses the discipline of her time-stamped sabbatical as a way of injecting propulsion, if not exactly urgency, into her narrative ... Lovely.
