An Education by Lynn Barber

An Education: My Life Would Have Turned Out Differently If I Had Just Said No   by Lynn Barber

Read by Carolyn Seymour

4 hours, 45 minutes

Published 2009 by Penguin 

Publisher's Summary: 

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 a precocious experience-an affair with an older man that would change her life. Barber's seducer left her with a taste for luxury hotels, 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.

My Thoughts:

As I was looking for an available audiobook about an author, I came across An Education. I'd seen the movie adaptation, starring Carey Mulligan and Peter Skarsgard but was unaware that it was adapted from a book (despite the fact that Nick Hornby was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay). I'd enjoyed the movie and thought I'd give the book a shot. 

I surprised to find the movie is, in fact, only an adaptation of the first chapter of the book. This was initially disappointing. But Barber went on to lead quite an interesting life and I soon got over my disappointment. Barber studied at St. Anne's College, Oxford, there briefly dating a drug smuggler before meeting the man she would later marry. After graduating, desperate for work as a journalist (and money), she took a job as an editorial assistant at, of all places, Penthouse magazine, which was in its early days. I must admit to having an adverse reaction to her working for this kind of publication. But Barber defends the magazine as being much classier then other smut magazine and her work there as being great experience in all kinds of journalist jobs, including interviews, which became the kind of writing she was best known for as her career continued. 

Marriage and motherhood were an education for Barber, as well. She hadn't expected to be good at either, nor to enjoy them, and was surprised to be proven wrong. In 2003, her husband of 32 years died of cancer. This part of the book felt even more honest than the rest of the book with Barber admitting that she was not the kind of person cut out to care for a dying person. 

An interesting life, well told and well read. Even if it wasn't what I expected at all, I enjoyed it.