Book review: An Education

Lynn Barber is celebrated for her acerbic wit and no-nonsense style as a celebrity interviewer, and this brief memoir is every bit as "candid, fun and down-to-earth" as her journalism, said Wendell Steavenson in the Sunday Times.

At its core is the account of her youthful affair with a man in his thirties, which Barber first published in Granta magazine. An associate of the notorious slum landlord Peter Rachman, her conman lover picks up the 16-year-old Lynn from a bus stop in his Bentley, takes her to bed, eventually proposes marriage, but turns out to have a wife and two kids.

These days the "flashy" cigar-smoking Simon would be called a predator or a groomer, said Alison Roberts in the London Evening Standard. But in the early Sixties, when "even the brightest girls were expected to bag a man at the first opportunity", Barber's parents encouraged the match - much to their daughter's bewilderment and scorn.

Barber seems never to have got over what she sees as her parents' betrayal, and paints a knowingly cruel portrait of their working-class social pretensions, said Deborah Orr in the Independent. Here is a potentially rich subject: the cult of "social mobility" and the consequent estrangement of a young woman from her parents. But Barber tells the story with a "scrupulous avoidance of insight or speculation".

The book goes on to cover voracious promiscuity at Oxford before Barber bags herself a more suitable husband; vignettes from her career at Penthouse and in Fleet Street, and finally a chilling account of her husband's sudden death. The writing is "funny, bold, incisive and clever".

Yet beneath all the "chutzpah", An Education is peculiarly naive. The famous interviewer, who says her schoolgirl affair taught her that people are unknowable, seems to find "herself unknowable, too" - and interrogates herself disappointingly little.

An Education, by Lynn Barber, 192pp (Penguin, £8.99) The Week Bookshop £8.54 (incl p&p) ·