Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Lynn Barber
Penguin 2009
Lynn Barber’s brief memoir is, the cover loudly proclaims, the inspiration for a film of the same name with a screenplay by Nick Hornby. Actually the film – not a bad one, actually - is based on just a small part of the book: Barber’s seduction as a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl by a charming conman, a close associate of the notorious landlord Peter Rachman. Elsewhere we learn of Barber’s time at Penthouse, her work as an interviewer for various national newspapers, and the death of her husband from a rare disease. We find out that during her second year at Oxford she slept with “around” 50 men (which, with the famous eight-week terms, works out at about two a week, every week) and later, perhaps unsurprisingly, wrote a sex manual. We discover very little, however, about the times in which she lived (at least after her childhood, where her description of growing up in the fifties chimed nicely with the account of the decade I’d read about in Family Britain). In fact, Barber comes across as rather self-obsessed, and her London-centric, middle-class meejah focus is annoying. That said this is an interesting read, and an honest one - the account of her husband’s final days almost painfully so. A good book to take on a very short holiday (it’s only 180 pages long).
18 August 2010
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Barber
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