An Education Author:Lynn Barber The inspiration for the award-winning motion picture: "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 and offered her a ride. It was an encounter that would change her life... more ». Her parents were as infatuated with ?Simon??the name she gives him in the book?as the adolescent Barber was, and dazzled by his worldliness. Simon introduced her to a world of luxury hotels and posh hotels and trips abroad. The problem was that he was married and had a child.
Admitted to Oxford, she studied English literature and ?bedded? more undergraduates than she could count, two preoccupations that prepared her for the literary life. In London she got a job at Penthouse, had a brief stint at Vanity Fair, and eventually became one of England?s most famous and feared interviewers. Her profiles in The Observer were memorable for their acerbity. At the approach of sixty, her husband, an artist, entered upon a long struggle with cancer. The trials and tensions that followed her husband?s diagnosis and subsequent botched operation reveal the complexities of marriage and the hidden mysteries in everyone?s life?even a spouse of twenty-two years. .« less