Went to London, Took the Dog: The Diary of a 60-Year-Old Runaway

From the beloved writer Nina Stibbe, author of Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life, comes this warm and funny story of a woman changing her life at sixty.

What does it mean to start again at sixty? In this “diary of a sixty-year-old runaway,” Stibbe leaves married life in Cornwall and heads back to London after twenty years away for what she calls a “year-long sabbatical.”

She takes up lodgings at the house of writer Deborah Moggach, unprepared for how she, and the city, has changed—and now wondering whether freedom is all it’s cracked up to be.

Through observations of everyday events—micromanaging her son’s online dating profile, navigating the politics of the local pool, laundry antics, mosquito infestations—Stibbe reflects on what it means to become “a proper adult” at last.