There’s a long history of nanny memoirs in British literature, from life-with-the-famous tell-alls like The Little Princesses by Marion Crawford, a long-time governess to Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose (the royals never forgave her), to alien-culture encounters, like The Diary of an American Au Pair by Marjorie Leet Fordin, in which a nanny to the family of an MP finds a volume of spanking porn beside her employers’ bed. (Fordin’s point: It was all very British.) But Nina Stibbe’s Love, Nina: A Nanny Writes Home, disarming and unexpectedly hilarious, mixing life-with-the-famous with a dash of life-in-an-alien-culture, trumps her predecessors. The sense of being gently tickled, page after page, with funny turns of phrase and silly, good-humored anecdotes seems to come to Stibbe directly from that great British charm-machine, P. G. Wodehouse.
Stibbe began writing these letters to her sister Vic, a nurse in Leicestershire, when she moved to London in 1982, at the age of twenty. She became a live-in nanny to Sam, then ten, who has Riley-Day syndrome, and his nine-year-old brother, Will. And here’s where the celebrity slips in: Their mother is Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review of Books (“You have to be a Ph.D. to get it”); the boys’ father, her ex-husband, is Stephen Frears, the director of My Beautiful Laundrette, a major anti-establishment film in the 1980s, and most recently of Philomena. Wilmers’s circle of friends and neighbors (“some real wierdos”) are nearly all famous—possibly more so