The journalist Lynn Barber is known for her acerbic features and interviews, and this memoir is no less candid, fun and down-to-earth. Written in a breezy ­vernacular — “I didn’t fancy”, “tremendous fun”, “appallingly naff”, “heaven forfend!” — An Education reads like a gossip over coffee with a fabulously irreverent mother-in-law.

It has been published, one suspects, to cash in on the release later this year of a Nick Hornby-penned film of the same name. That film is based on one of the book’s central events — an account Barber first wrote for Granta magazine of her affair as a 16-year-old schoolgirl with a thirtysomething charmer with a Bentley, a self-proclaimed property developer who picked her up at a bus stop, and who, after he had proposed to her, turned out to be already married.

Barber’s description of the liaison is a chilling glimpse into the guileless limbo between girlhood and adulthood. But the story swiftly moves on and any explanation of her parents’ strange encouragement of the affair (“You don’t need to go to Oxford if you’ve got a good husband,” her mother told her) is unsatisfyingly left unexplored. Barber does go to Oxford, marries, has children and appears to ascend the greasy pole of Fleet Street with ease. She writes a bestselling sex book in the 1970s, luxuriates in the generous expense accounts of the 1980s, complains about the insidious sexism at The Independent in the early 1990s, struggles against the stringent fact-checking of Vanity Fair, dashes off copy and reaps awards.

That is until her husband becomes seriously ill, and the paragraphs uncharacteristically clog with dates and doctors, bad test results and agonising decisions. For all her wryness, Barber can be bracingly sharp, and her forthrightness pierces the delusions of the celebrities she interviews and her own “pretty smug” life among London’s chattering classes. Nor does she shy from describing the guilt, regret and suspicions that cloud her memories of 30 years of marriage. Generally, though, she tends to skip over introspection; as a result her memoir feels a little slight, as the amusing and anecdotal are favoured over any deeper emotional perspective.

An Education by Lynn Barber
Penguin £8.99 pp183

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