A Curious Career - Lynn Barber

Lynn Barber's incisive interviews, recalled in this entertaining memoir, simply define the genre

• Rachel Cooke - The Observer, Sunday 11 May 2014

‘Her dial isn’t always set to demon’: Lynn Barber pictured in 2006 during her time with the Observer. Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer

Lynn Barber believes that she owes her career as a newspaper interviewer, at least in part, to her childhood, which was at once perfectly ordinary and strikingly odd. She grew up an only child in a perfectly ordinary Edwardian house in a perfectly ordinary Twickenham street, and in the 50s, too – a decade in which perfect ordinariness was the sine qua non of successful suburban life. Her mother taught elocution, and her father was a civil servant. Yet only rarely was she inclined to invite other girls from her posh school over for tea. Her parents had no family and seemingly no friends, and as a result of this relative isolation their behaviour could seem odd, even alarming, to outsiders. God forbid that someone might pop over for a glass of orange squash only to find her father doing the ironing while singing the song Hitler Has Only Got One Ball. "We were not the sort of family you came across in Enid Blyton," she writes. "Or indeed anywhere as far as I could see."

Not unnaturally, Barber was curious to know how other families lived, and she was always asking questions. Her friends thought this quite weird: why did she want to know whether their fathers kissed their mothers when they came home from work? But it was also useful: "I was always the one deputed to ask Virginia if she'd snogged the Hampton Grammar boy who took her to the cinema last night." Combine this intense nosiness and flagrant lack of inhibition with the fallout from her teenage love affair with an older conman – a relationship she detailed in her 2009 memoir, An Education, and which taught her that people are not always what they seem – and you have pretty much all the qualifications a good interviewer needs. (Though a working knowledge of libel law is always a plus.)
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