By Lynn Barber - An Education Paperback – December 16, 2009

I really liked this book which I bought after seeing the movie and reading Lynn Barber's long interview in The Guardian. It is refreshing to read a straight-forward, honest autobiography/memoir. What was missing in the movie was that she got tired of Simon long before her parents found out he was a liar and a creep; in the movie, you get the impression she was having the time of her life and was shocked to find out that Simon was anything other than what he told her he was. The record is set straight in the book where we learn that she thought he was weird at best and would have stopped seeing him but for the encouragement, almost insistence, of her parents, especially her father. The education she got from Simon was that people are almost always NOT as they appear. Hello Tiger Woods? (sorry)I did like this book, though, which I thought was well written. It is always interesting to read about other people's lives to see why they took the directions in life that they did. In this case, Lynn Barber wanted to be a journalist, and she worked as a journalist wherever she could get a job. Her first job was at Penthouse magazine. Sobeit. She learned and moved on. She also became a wife and mother, jobs she didn't think she wanted or was cut out for but that she ended up loving after all. All in all, she was a lucky lady.

British journalist, Lynn Barber, born in 1944, wrote a memoir piece about her teenage affair with an older guy for Granta and it was that piece on which the movie of the same name was based. This fuller version begins with a chapter on her childhood, then moves to "An Education," and follows with her Oxford years, marriage, writing for the start-up Penthouse magazine, later success in the world and personal events up to a few years ago. There are many episodes worth comment, but I don't want to risk spoilers.Throughout this engaging, well-written book, Barber is warm, human, candid and often very funny. She never claims victimhood over anything; she learns from all of her experiences. All of the chapters could have been titled "an education" because of that. The chief lesson she learns is the ultimate unknowability of other people.

I really enjoyed this book. I bought the audio version and the reader is perfect for the material. Barber is a very good writer. Part of the book is the basis for the film, and, while Barber can be a bit more harsh than her film character regarding her affair with an older man, she is smart and funny and worth a read. I enjoyed learning about her life and I wish her other books were on CD.

I couldn't even finish this self-congradulatory hot mess. I read the first half and found her writing style choppy and unnatural. The author comes across as full of herself and insufferable, which would have been fine if I felt like that was the image she was trying to create. I don't often stop a book before I have finished it but I just couldn't anymore.

I found Lynn Barber's memoir concise, to the point and highly enjoyable. I lived in London in the mid to late 1960s, as a college student, and that sharing of time and place was a reason for reading her book and one source of strongly identifying with her. I also strongly identify with the more personal experiences which she relates, and her honesty in describing them and her ability to put them in perspective is enlightening, helpful on a personal level, and even therapeutic. I think her writing style is a textbook on how it should be done.The movie An Education made me first take notice of Lynn Barber. I then read her short work on which the movie was based; that and the excerpt on Amazon made her book a much wanted read, and I was not disappointed. Her experiences at Penthouse should be the basis of another movie, and one with the potential to be outstanding.Lynn Barber writes with wit and humor, great honesty, and some timeless revelations about self-discovery, for example the truth that the more one knows, the more one discovers just how little one really understands.

I fell in the love w/the movie so I bought the book. As I was reading the first chapter, I suddenly realized it (the first chapter) was the entire movie and was so surprised to read beyond that short period of time in her life. What a fun time to be a woman and a journalist. Loved it!

Loved the movie so I wanted to read the book. It did not disappoint. Quick read.

So, I bought this book because I loved the movie so much....But, this book is NOT THE MOVIE. It is just one chapter, and a total letdown.*************Spoiler -************In the book, the real story, she just uses the older guy and seems to have little feelings for him.It is nothing like the movie which I happened to love!

I breezed through the book and like a previous reviewer said, it was 'like a breath of fresh air'. I read Lynn's biography within five days, which by my standards is very fast indeed.I have always liked reading biographies, especially when, like this one, you can really get inside the writer. I can honestly say that this is by far and away, the most impressive biography I have read. What an interesting life, full of experience. A life of great achievement, happiness and inevitably, great loss and sadness. Lynn is so open, bold and unashamed, so honest and yet I can get a sense and feel of vulnerability. Qualities I'm sure that enable her to get the best out of her interviewees.It is an enjoyable and pleasant book to read, even though you know it has been written by a Grade A intellectual. By comparison I'm quite dim, in fact I've been compared to being 'as thick as a pudding', and I frequently had to keep reaching for my dictionary. So it has been an education.Brilliant book. What an amazing life.Thank you Lynn.

I am biased, mainly because I have always liked Lynn Barber and greatly admired her journalistic skill. I cannot understand the hostility which some reviewers have shown to her and this book. To me, she comes across as someone who would be excellent company and is honest and self-aware enough to write about her faults as well as her obvious strengths. So although she can dish it out when it comes to criticism, it is clear that she can also take it. Ok, this is no great work of literature, but it IS an interesting, informative, entertaining and well-written read. My only disappointment is that it isn't longer - I could easily have coped with 100 pages more in the same vein.

Pros - an easy enough, short read. Interesting life. Her selfishness is something I think most people, who are truly honest with themselves, can identify with. It's a relief/breath of fresh air to hear a British person be that brutally honest about aspects of their life (e.g. having to do things out of loyalty rather than love/feeling like you're a failure because you don't seem to want to do the selfless acts other people seem to do with ease and without a second though).Cons - Much of the book feels like a shopping list or a child's story "and then I did this and then I did that" with absolutely no insight into why she did certain things, felt or acted in a certain way throughout her life. Flippant remarks are made or basic arguments in favour of certain choices she made in her life with no real investment being made in explaining to the reader her thought process, any inner turmoil she experienced before reaching a decision or viewpoint etc. The events with Simon, her strict upbringing and strained relationship with her parents shaped the person she became yet it is played down. Even the film, adapted from one chapter of the book, does a better job of humanising the author. The section on her university education is extremely, and rather unbelievably, brief (limited, it seemed, to how many men she had sex with before meeting her husband) Why chose to sound like some alpha male, macho man when the very stereotype is something to be laughed at nowadays? Name dropping celebrities and awards/accolades on, near enough, every other page in one section became tedious and, although the author ridicules herself for feeling such things matter in her life, she makes no attempt to reason why this is. So instead of empathising with her, I found her a very unlikeable, arrogant, selfish person. Yet this seems to completely contradict the favours people have done for her, how highly she is valued by others including many friends and colleagues it would seem. Does she paint herself in an unfair light in this book? Whether it was because it was too painful, she had a bad memory of the past to properly do non-facts justice or, just plain didn't want to/doesn't know how to, the author fails to properly analyse her own emotions and the impact of certain key events in her life. In my book group's opinion, this is where the book is lacking and where people, who presumably don't know the author, will struggle to warm to her as a person. The book has the characteristic flawed central character but lacks human warmth I'm afraid - something perhaps the editors should have picked up on during earlier drafts rather than the writer herself.

Lynn Barber is extraordinarily frank about her personal life which she describes in a lively style. In the early chapters she describes her relationship, while still a school-girl, with a charming older lover who turned out be be a bit a wide boy in business. She is pragmatic about this period of her life and sees it as educational. Her professional life as a journalist swung from the sublime to the ridiculous, but she takes the ups and downs in her stride. She was fortunate in having a happy marriage with an accommodating and supportive partner which makes the final chapters all the more poignant as he develops a rare disorder when only in his 50s . His decline and death make painful reading as Lynn is searingly honest about her mixed emotions during this awful time. I admire her frankness about herself and her feelings that will touch a nerve of recognition in most readers.

Barber comes across as an intensely dislikeable person with the emotional range of a biscuit. The autobiographical content itself is at best boring and at times distasteful, coupled with an often A-Level-esque writing style that always fall painfully short of the mark.I bought this book off the back of seeing the excellent film adaptation, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Do NOT make the same mistake - if anything, the book actually put me off the film. All I can say is that the superb Nick Hornby did WONDERS with this garbage.My copy went straight to the charity shop.