An Education
By (Author) Lynn Barber
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Books Ltd
17th July 2009
25th June 2009
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
News media and journalism
070.92
Paperback
224
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 16mm
202g
My life might have turned out differently if I had just said No. But I was not quite rude enough. 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.
Candid, unsentimental and extremely funny. I read it in one glorious go, laughing and crying throughout. -- Zoe Heller
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.