lovely little memoir

I wandered into the bookstore even though I couldn’t afford to buy any books.  Somehow, despite knowing I couldn’t afford to buy anything at all, I still managed to walk out of the store with a very tiny memoir.  I guess, maybe, I convinced myself it was just a little purchase and of course, being so little, it wouldn’t really hurt.  Financially, I probably shouldn’t have bought the book.  But I’m glad that I did.

An Education by Lynn Barber is short and sweet and just a little sad and just a little funny.  It’s really quite a lovely little memoir.  Although, the blurb at the back of the book completely misdirected me about what this memoir is actually about, I liked it nonetheless.

From the blurb I expected the whole memoir to deal with Lynn’s relationship with Simon when she was 16.  I guess I figured we would spend more time getting to understand the why:  and maybe the most interesting part of the why was why her parents would let their 16 year old daughter date a much, much older man.  But this blurb misdirection didn’t change my wanting to continue to read the book.

Lynn Barber has clearly found her voice as a writer.  It’s hard not to listen to her.  And I also really enjoyed the fact that Lynn sounds British in her memoir.  It’s not just certain words she uses but there was even the sense that her sentences were somehow different.  In my head, I heard Lynn’s voice through her words and it was a very intimate experience.  I respect writers that can do that with words on a page and one day want to be able to do the same.  And this ability to sound so unique on the page, so personal, is contrasted sharply with her spoken accent, which she pins down as fake and placeless.

I was swept along by Lynn so I didn’t quite realize it until the end, but the whole Simon taught her a very important lesson about men and herself didn’t come off as neatly as I assume the publisher/maybe Lynn herself wanted it to be.  I actually loved the fact that the memoir had started with Simon and then moved off into the future and he was hardly ever mentioned again.  That is, until, we reach the end:

But, as I said before, I am a deep believer in the unknowability of other people — such was the lesson I learned from Simon all those years ago.

This, the last sentence in the memoir, feels so pat.  So lesson learned.  So clearly wrapped up in the way that “education” in the sense that I thought Lynn was using it was completely turned on its head (and maybe even thrown out the window).  Education for me has become this thing that doesn’t happen in a school (what happens in school is formal learning); education is the things that happens when you walk through the world and something happens to you and if you are open to it, you walk away from that experience with something new.  Lynn met Simon and he wasn’t the person he pretended to be and then when she grew up she married David, who by all accounts is a “good” man.  But then, at the end, Lynn is making her experiences with Simon a clear “lesson” for people to carry away with them from the pages of a book.  She turned her education into formal learning.  And that kind of education can’t really be passed along in formal learning so why present it to us as if it can be?

I’ve decided to ignore the last sentence of the memoir.  If I didn’t think defacing books was a crime, I would scratch out the last few lines of text.  Most memoirs start with something extraordinary and then something even more extraordinary happens and wow, it’s all crazy, mad, thrilling, unbelievable stuff.  Instead, Lynn writes about a strange encounter and then things get normal:  she writes about her husband and her writing jobs (despite the fact that she worked for Penthouse at one point) and her kids and then on becoming a widow.

My main problem with a memoir is when it comes across feeling empty (as if the reason behind the memoir was only a cash grab, or if the writer fabricated the situation in order to be able to write a memoir); An Education didn’t suffer from that deep and enduring emptiness and instead, Lynn’s voice was strong enough to compensate the heavy-handed lesson at the end.