An Education

When Lynn Barber was sixteen, a stranger in a maroon sports car pulled up beside her as she was on her way home from school and offered her a ride. It was the beginning of a long journey from innocence to precocious experience-an affair with an older man that would change her life. Barber's seducer left her with a taste for luxury hotels and posh restaurants and trips abroad, expensive habits that she managed to support in later life as a successful London journalist whose barbed interviews at once terrorized and fascinated her smart-set subjects. A poignant, shockingly candid account of the stages in a literary life-from promiscuity at Oxford to a stint at Penthouse to a complex marriage that endured-An Education is a classic of English memoir.