An Education

by Lynn Barber(Penguin $30)

Reviewed by Michele Hewitson

Lynn Barber, the Observer's celebrity interviewer, is known as the Demon Barber - a title she (sometimes) baulks at, while noting that editors like the sarkier pieces best, and readers remember them. Still, one of her collections of interviews was titled The Demon Barber, so while she baulks, she is not above basking.Or boasting. "By the time I was 16, I had filled out ... and with my new curves ... was beginning to become quite a looker."And, "since joining the Observer, I've won two more British press awards, and was particularly pleased to get one in 2003 which meant I could say that I'd won press awards over three decades - or better still, over two millennia. I know it is appallingly naff to boast about awards but I adore them."That's honest, but it is, yes, appallingly naff.

And you can imagine what she'd write about an interviewee who boasted about their awards in such a fashion. Particularly "or better still, over two millennia".She writes of the "unknowability" of people including, presumably, herself. And warns, "you are in the hands of a deeply unreliable memoirist whose memory is not to be trusted".

For all that, she seems to have a pretty good take on herself as a rather priggish, snobby young girl who was raised to think she was superior. Be careful what you wish for, parents. Because, surprise, she turned out to have a sneering take on the parents who created this creature. She writes about her mother's "beta or maybe even beta-minus brain" and the knowledge that she and her father were the superior beings in that small household. But her father, for all that intelligence, remained stuck: "He had a middle-class salary, but he somehow remained working class."When her parents announced they were moving from Ashford to Twickenham, and so presumably up the middle class ladder, to a big house, the young Barber pictured "a rambling pile with attics and battlements and secret staircases".

When she saw the "solid Edwardian three-up, three-down, terraced house" she said, yes, sneeringly, "But you said it was big!" And continued for years (to this day?) to believe her parents had lied, and to repeat this refrain. She doesn't record what her parents' reaction to this ingratitude was.There is much more of this sort of stuff. About how clever she was at school and how she hated the thick girls and how they hated her.But her real disdain is reserved for her parents - and possibly herself; she seems pretty knowing, actually. The education of the title refers, in the first instance (later comes Oxford where she educated herself in the ways of bonking) to a conman she calls Simon who picked up the 16-year-old school girl one day, in his flash Bristol car, and wooed her, and her parents. She eventually had some coy and unsatisfactory sex with him. He asked her to marry him. He was already married, with two kids. He was undoubtedly a rotter, if a pathetic one, but the real rotters, again, are her parents who encouraged her to give up Oxford for marriage to Simon.Her parents should have known, she thinks. She felt as much betrayed by them as by the conman. She seems never to have really forgiven them despite having gone on to Oxford after all.

It is from this event that her thesis of "unknowability", or mistrust, really stems.The middle of the book is about becoming a journalist, first at Penthouse, a mildly diverting few years for her. But at the heart of the memoir is her relationship with David, the man who would become her husband.

The last 40-odd pages of this brisk memoir (she might be looking back but she doesn't muck about in the telling) tell of his diagnosis with myelofibrosis and his death after a bone marrow transplant.She writes, after he was originally misdiagnosed with leukaemia, that he might have 10 years to live. "How could I imagine that? And how was I supposed to comport myself in the meantime? Was I suddenly supposed to be the doting wife, sticking to my husband's side, tending to his every whim? For 10 days maybe, but not for 10 years. Anyway, it would drive him mad, never mind me."This manages to be both funny and bleak. It is also a brilliantly honest economical observation of marriage.

In achieving her story arc (she's far too good a writer not to know exactly what she was doing) she's prepared to sacrifice herself for that greater good. David, she writes, was everything she wasn't: kind and good and trusting. She does her best to convince us of this, but doesn't quite pull it off. You like her more for it, by the end, but you think while reading her memoir that it's not one of her better profiles.

Footnote:

Michele Hewitson is a NZ Herald features writer. This review was first published in the NZ Herald on Saturday 15 August. It is reproduced here with kind permission of the reviewer and the Herald.