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 both 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.

LYNN BARBER studied English at Oxford University. She began her career in journalism at Penthouse and has since worked for a number of major British newspapers and for Vanity Fair. She has won five British Press Awards and has published two volumes of her celebrated interviews, Mostly Men and Demon Barber.