Product Description

When the journalist Lynn Barber was 16, she was picked up at a bus-stop by an attractive older man who drew up in his sports car - and her life was almost wrecked. A bright confident girl, on course to go to Oxford, she began a relationship which, incredibly, was encouraged by her conventional, suburban parents and which took her into the louche, semi-criminal world of west London just as the 1960s began. Ruin beckoned, until one day she made an important discovery. 'An Education', the opening piece of this fascinating memoir, was highly praised when first published in Granta magazine, and is currently being filmed by the BBC with a Nick Hornby script.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #517 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-25
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Review
"Candid, unsentimental and extremely funny. I read it in one glorious go, laughing and crying throughout.' --Zoe Heller

About the Author
Lynn Barber studied English at Oxford University. She began her career in journalism at Penthouse, and has since worked for a number of major British newspapers and for Vanity Fair. She currently writes for the Observer. She has published two volumes of her celebrated interviews, Mostly Men and Demon Barber.

Customer Reviews

This is a brilliant book
As per Zoe Heller's quote, I also read this in one great, greedy gulp while dinner burnt and children went unfed - aside from its many other virtues, An Education is unputdownable, by turns hysterically funny, illuminating, jaw-dropping and, towards the end, unbearably moving. Lynn Barber writes beautifully, with honesty and a frankness that is occasionally devastating, and without an iota of sentimentality or self-pity as she tells her story, which I defy you not to be gripped by - parents, class, sex, love, dodgy blokes, Oxford, Penthouse, and the rest. There isn't a boring sentence in the entire book, which isn't something you find yourself saying very often.

It's the best memoir I've read in years, a timely antidote to all those bloated, windy reminiscences - 'What, little me?' - that feel like they're written with a pen dipped in special extra-smug ink. Lynn's pen is dipped in truth serum instead. I can't think of anyone who wouldn't love reading it.

Unsatisfactory memoir, but great page turner
This is a very thin autobiography that seems to leave out more than it includes. There are numerous tantalising glimpses of potentially revealing details, which are then never explored. We never find out why Barber's mother is a "beta-minus brain", or what Jonathan and Maria Aitken were really like at Oxford. There is tons of name-dropping, but little in the way of telling tales, which probably ensures that Barber keeps her friends, but disappoints her readers. Those who enjoy reading about Oxbridge bluestockings will find Barber's experiences as an undergraduate are only sketchily recalled, and her recollections of her Penthouse and Fleet Street journalism days aren't a patch on Anne Robinson's.

Yet the book is written in Barber's typically sparkling, tell-it-like-it-is style, and I found it very entertaining. Like Zoe Heller on the cover, and India Knight above, I just couldn't put it down once started, and stayed up into the early hours to finish it, having meant to just read a couple of chapters at bedtime. There are plenty of amusing episodes that made me laugh, and the chapter about her husband's early death (particularly following the chapter relating how they fell in love) made me quite tearful.

'An Education' isn't quite up to the standard set by Lorna Sage's 'Bad Blood', but if you loved the latter, I am sure you will enjoy this book.

A slight let down
I bought this book on the basis of some of the "good" reviews here - not a good idea if you are thinking of doing the same.

Lynn rattles through her life without really telling very much at all, the only chapter which doesn't read as though she is writing for the sake of it, is the chapter about her husband's demise (which is written with feeling and care), the rest of the book is a series of 'I did such and such', 'I went to so and so' without elaborating, also her persistence in telling the reader how intelligent and pretty she was/is is rather tiresome. She also name drops quite a lot but with little effect as no details are given.

The synopsis on the reverse of the book talks mainly of the lover she had from being a sixteen year old and for a couple of years thereafter and how he conned her and her parents, but by her own admission, she was more taken by his friends than she was actually by him, so why devote so much to him - well, because nothing much else of note is in the book, despite her age and varied life.

I am surprised that this is "soon to be the subject of a major film scripted by Nick Hornby" since if it anything like this book, it will have little substance and it will certainly require a lot of poetic licence to make it of interest.