AUDIOBOOK
About
When Lynn Barber was sixteen, a stranger in a maroon sports car pulled up beside her as she was on her way home from school and offered her a ride. It was the beginning of a long journey from innocence to precocious experience—an affair with an older man that would change her life. Barber's seducer left her with a taste for luxury hotels and posh restaurants and trips abroad, expensive habits that she managed to support in later life as a successful London journalist whose barbed interviews both terrorized and fascinated her smart-set subjects. A poignant, shockingly candid account of the stages in a literary life—from promiscuity at Oxford to a stint at Penthouse to a complex marriage that endured—An Education is a classic of English memoir.
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Reviews
"Few pieces of journalism have been more riveting than the hatchet jobs Lynn Barber used to make of the profiles she wrote for the Independent On Sunday and the Observer. Waiting avidly for the next one, I used to marvel that anyone was fool enough to submit themselves to her merciless examination. And now she has written a book as riveting as the profiles."
Daily Mail (London)
"[Barber's] a suburban girl who's frightened that she's going to get cut out of everything good that happens in the city. That, to me, is a big story in popular culture. It's the story of pretty much every rock 'n' roll band."
Nick Hornby, author of the screenplay adaptation of An Education
"Candid, unsentimental and extremely funny. I read it in one glorious go, laughing and crying throughout."
Zoë Heller, novelist and journalist