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On John Prescott, for example: ‘You wouldn’t want to invite Prezza to dinner, not because he might eat peas off his knife, but because he’d bore the other guests to death.’ What makes Barber such an unfailingly enjoyable read is that she makes her own judgments about people, which means she often likes monsters or disdains saints. Her style is brisk to the point of breathless and so informal (a typical sentence is ‘Crikey.’) that the reader is flattered into feeling as if they were an intimate of hers, catching up on private gossip. The fact that she tends to highlight her own failings adds to the fun.
This style characterises her memoir, An Education. There is swanking: ‘I know it’s appallingly naff to boast about awards, but I adore them’; undergraduate promiscuity: ‘I probably slept with about 50 men in my second year’; as well as disloyalty, impatience, indiscretion. She relishes her own perversity: ‘I have always found it difficult to hate the rich, as good leftie journalists are meant to do, because they’ve always been so nice to me’. She will confound feminists by refusing to condemn soft porn (her first journalistic job was on Penthouse), on the grounds that old men and young boys need ‘something to wank over’. All of which makes An Education an absolutely marvellous read. The only thing wrong with it is that it’s too short.
After a summary chapter about her childhood, Barber recounts the story of her affair, at 16, with a much older and (it turns out) criminal and also married man. This segment, which took place in the London of the early 1960s, is about to appear as a film, written by Nick Hornby. What is brilliant and tantalising about this chapter is what is left out, as much as what we are told. It is never altogether clear why her parents accept this unwholesome suitor, nor what he looks like, nor quite what shady property business he is involved in.
Barber becomes an Oxford undergraduate: ‘A horror that first term was finding there were people my own age cleverer than me!’; sleeps with young men; fixes on the one she wants to marry and then bags him. She goes to work for Penthouse, where her editor is the victim of a pioneering hair transplant: ‘which resulted in an unfortunate black dotted line across his forehead and a few tufts like lettuce seedlings on his crown’. Her description of the magazine’s owner, Bob Guccione and his consort, Kathy Keeton, is hilarious. Years later Barber is despatched to New York to interview the couple; a piece which should, I think, have been included as an appendix.
She writes a couple of sex guides, which enable her to stay at home with her two little daughters, then goes to work for the Sunday Express. There are stints for Vanity Fair and The Independent on Sunday. ‘So this is where I’d got to circa 2000’, she writes: ‘I was in my mid-fifties, pretty confident, pretty happy, in truth pretty smug.’ But not for long. Her lovely, handsome husband falls ill, then dies. It is a shocking end, somehow, to this pacy and witty account of her life. A wonderful little postscript will leave the reader with a smile, but expect the odd tear, too.
Because you read about journalism
Also by Cressida Connolly
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