An Education
The Inspiration for the Award-Winning Motion Picture, An Education
“Candid, unsentimental and extremely funny. I read it in one glorious go, laughing and crying throughout.” —Zoë Heller
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.
“[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 An Education
“The most riveting memoir you will read this year. It is short, pithy, fast-paced, comic and tragic by turns…a small masterpiece.” —Valerie Grove (Times Literary Review)
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About the Author
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 has won five British Press Awards and has published two volumes of her celebrated interviews, Mostly Men and Demon Barber. She lives in London.