An Education

Lynn Barber

In an age of fawning celebrity interviews conducted under the eyes of a team of PR people, usually to promote a new book or film, the Demon Barber, as she is known, is a breath of fresh, if rather bracing air. She has a tremendous curiosity about people and is a good listener, writing punchy, revealing pieces when the subject is interesting: the painter Howard Hodgkin, for example, Rudolf Nureyev, Roald Dahl or Muriel Spark.

In 2003 she published an essay in Granta about her teenage relationship with an older man. An Education includes this, but also covers her life before and after that episode — which was the inspiration for the film An Education, scripted by Nick Hornby.

It is, as you would expect, a brisk and entertaining read, pithy, self-aware and unsparing in its honesty. The ‘older man’, Simon, who was about 31 to her 16, is described as “a short, rather ugly, long-faced, splay-footed man who talked in different accents and lied about his age”.

Barber was working hard at school, aiming for a place at Oxford to catapult her out of the dull, middle-class world she was born into. Simon, who picked her up at a bus stop, had an expensive sports car and seemed wealthy, but Lynn quickly realised he was a conman. The only gentlemanly thing he did was to wait until she was 17 before taking her virginity.

Her parents allowed him to take her away for weekends — to Paris, Bruges, Amsterdam — part of her “education” — which also included fine dining and night-clubbing. They were delighted when he proposed marriage. When Lynn protested that accepting would mean she couldn’t go to Oxford, to her horror her parents replied that a rich husband was more important than university.

Then Lynn discovered that Simon was already married. The episode, she says, was good for her career as an interviewer, tempering her natural curiosity about people with a certain scepticism, making her observe their behaviour, rather than believing what they said.

She did get to Oxford, where she met her husband, David, an artist and Old Etonian from a diplomatic background. He opted for a less pressured career as an academic and did all the cooking and much of the child-minding of their two daughters.

Barber’s unusual career path, from writing soft porn for Penthouse (seven years), to magazine features for the Sunday Express (seven years), to interviews for the new and fashionable Independent on Sunday, where in 1989 she became “an overnight success at 46,” is wittily described. Most touching of all is her description of David’s untimely death at 59, and how his illness made them reassess their 30-year marriage, and put it right while there was still time. Now aged 66, she is still working as hard as ever.

“I would be totally old farty otherwise,” she says, with typical forthrightness.