An Education

this is a great little book. Lynn Barber has had an interesting life which she shares with the readers in an engaging and humorous manner. Not overly long, this autobigraphy(ette) is just enough to pique your interest.

I read this in about two days during one of the busiest weeks of my semester. This book moves quickly; Barber wastes little time in describing each event and uses (relatively) spare language, yet the prose is beautiful and had me in tears at one point. Very little of it was used in the movie of the same name, but so much the better--what comes after the Simon story was much more interesting to me. Maybe I felt as though I could relate to Barber so I just liked her, but at every turn she comes across as self-aware, funny, and wise. I loved this book, and 5 days after I finished it, it's still in my head. My only regret is that I wish it had been longer.

I really liked this book which I bought after seeing the movie and reading Lynn Barber's long interview in The Guardian. It is refreshing to read a straight-forward, honest autobiography/memoir. What was missing in the movie was that she got tired of Simon long before her parents found out he was a liar and a creep; in the movie, you get the impression she was having the time of her life and was shocked to find out that Simon was anything other than what he told her he was. The record is set straight in the book where we learn that she thought he was weird at best and would have stopped seeing him but for the encouragement, almost insistence, of her parents, especially her father. The education she got from Simon was that people are almost always NOT as they appear. Hello Tiger Woods? (sorry) I did like this book, though, which I thought was well written. It is always interesting to read about other people's lives to see why they took the directions in life that they did. In this case, Lynn Barber wanted to be a journalist, and she worked as a journalist wherever she could get a job. Her first job was at Penthouse magazine. Sobeit. She learned and moved on. She also became a wife and mother, jobs she didn't think she wanted or was cut out for but that she ended up loving after all. All in all, she was a lucky lady.

When she was 16, Lynn Barber got into a car with a strange man. Soon - and with her parents' blessing - this obviously dodgy character was showing her a good time in London's West End and eventually he proposed. She was going to Oxford, but why bother, her parents said, when a man with money presented himself? How typical of the Striving 60s! Barber says this experience taught her to doubt the claims people make about themselves - no bad thing for a journalist. She never lost the readiness to go for it that got her to Oxford and glittering prizes that include five awards and gigs with Penthouse, the Observer and Vanity Fair. Grab the chance to read this entertaining memoir while it's being republished alongside Nick Hornby's film adaptation. When she describes her husband's final illness, this entertaining, artfully shaped memoir segues into a moving coda.