An Education by Lynn Barber

The book is built around the second chapter, which first appeared in Granta magazine in 2003 and has now been turned into a film by Nick Hornby. At the age of 16, an attractive, naïve, yet horribly precocious only child living in Twickenham, Barber began a twoyear-long sexual relationship with a much older man whom she calls Simon. Nowadays flashy Simon, with his posh motors and fancy cigars, would be called a predator or a groomer — definitely a weirdo — but back then, still in the days when even the brightest girls were expected to bag a man at the first opportunity, it was Barber's parents who actively encouraged the affair. They knew almost nothing about him yet effectively "threw me into bed with him" by agreeing to his request that he take Lynn away for weekends. "Why go to Oxford when I could marry Simon?", Barber's father began to ask.

It's clearly the Simon episode that makes Barber so loathe her parents in retrospect. Boy, does she murder them. Her father — "formidably intelligent but socially untamed" — gets it in the neck for sticking to his working-class roots, not providing a big enough house for her to grow up in and having a broad Lancashire accent. But it's the newly middleclass pretension of her mother, an elocution teacher, that really winds her up. "My mother was far more civilised [than dad], but as I told my father, she had only a beta or maybe even beta-minus brain." Simon, it turned out, was a married father of two; a thief and a conman who consorted with the notorious Sixties landlord Peter Rachman. "My parents were white with shock — unlike me, they had no inkling before that Simon was dishonest." But by now Barber has done her best to make the whole family (including herself ) seem so awful, that you're very nearly rooting for him.

The second odd thing about Barber is that after Oxford, she worked for Penthouse. It's a career move she glosses neatly — "I know it probably sounds deluded now, but we really did feel we were part of the sexual revolution, fighting a crusade against censorship" — but I did find myself at this point wondering why on earth the young Barber can't escape the clutches of these relentlessly seedy men.

She does, eventually, when she marries David Cardiff, her saintlysounding husband. "David was good. He was thoroughly kind, thoroughly truthful, thoroughly decent. Whereas I was somehow morally damaged. I had become a proficient liar in my years with Simon and found it hard to break the habit." And so the final chapter, in which David dies a really quite vile death from the bone marrow disorder myelofibrosis, is suddenly very moving. The memoir changes pitch here. Barber's dreaded facts acquire crucial importance and intensity — the exact timing of hospital appointments, the barely comprehensible meaning of test results, the nasty medical detail of disease.

The rest of the book fills in the career gaps, and while there's no real insight gained from Barber's 28 years on Fleet Street (a shame, from such a heavy-hitter) its snapshot of the "entirely male cabal" who ran the newborn Independent on Sunday will undoubtedly raise some grizzled hacks' hackles.

Barber's voice is of course hugely confident — sometimes grumpy, often a bit snooty, very often funny and always extremely frank. Take this to the beach; and be grateful for feminism.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

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.