An Education by Lynn Barber: review

It takes courage for a journalist with a reputation for exposing the flaws, weaknesses and evasions of others to write a memoir exposing herself. Lynn Barber, who has made her name by filleting the people she interviews, is certainly brave; this short, breezily written memoir starts by recounting how she was seduced by a con man when she was still a schoolgirl and ends by describing in excruciating detail her much-loved husband’s illness and death. Her frankness, though, is perhaps as much artful as truthful. As she says at the outset, she has never been a slave to facts.

At 16, we learn, she was a pretty, clever, unworldly girl living in suburbia and working hard for her A-levels. Her parents, both of whom she describes as coming from 'the lower orders’ (she seems curiously preoccupied with class), had great ambitions for their only child. When she brought home 'Simon’, the charming man more than twice her age who had picked her up at the bus stop in his sleek maroon Bristol and proceeded to wine and dine her and turn her pretty, clever little head, they were as bowled over as she was. When he asked her to marry him her mother’s response was that there was now no need to bother with university after all. By this time, though, she knew he was not what he seemed and before long discovered that he was married, a father and a crook. She dropped him and went on to Oxford, a good degree, a happy marriage and a successful career.

But huge and lasting damage had been done. Barber’s account is almost without self-pity, but it is full of anger, towards 'Simon’ for his lies and his lechery, towards herself for being so gullible, but most of all towards her parents. Her hostility and contempt towards them make uncomfortable reading; she seems to resent to this day her father’s working-class origins, her mother’s genteel pretensions (she gave elocution lessons) and her 'beta’ brain. Not only had they failed to protect her from a sexual predator, they had betrayed her by not seeing through him before she did.

This brutal disillusionment with love, both parental and sexual, has conditioned her whole life. As she says, she had learned too young not to trust anybody and to believe that none of us can ever really know or trust anyone else. No doubt this cynicism has helped her become the journalist she is; she is proud of her career, which began on Penthouse (presented here as an unlikely force for good) and proceeded, via a book entitled How to Improve Your Man in Bed, to the Independent on Sunday, Vanity Fair and now The Observer.

She had, however, the good fortune to love and be loved by a decent man, her husband David, who she met at Oxford and married soon afterwards. Her account of him rings true and is deeply touching; he was, she writes, 'entirely good’, while she herself was 'morally damaged’. The final part of this book describes how he endured a failed bone marrow transplant and subsequently died; it makes painful reading, not least because of her own desperate feelings of inadequacy and guilt. In a postscript, she tells a strange tale of how, after his death, she became briefly convinced that he had been unfaithful to her, as if only another betrayal could give her the strength to accept his loss.

For all its black humour, this is a sad book. As well as being a cautionary tale about sex and class it is, in a small way, a tragedy of innocence lost.

An Education

By Lynn Barber

GRANTA, £8.99, 183pp

Available from Telegraph Books 0844 871 1516

Read the Daily Telegraph Review by Jane Shilling