Hephzibah Anderson
Demon with a Dictaphone
Lynn Barber is, by her own admission, ‘exceptionally nosy’. Still a working journalist at seventy, she sums up her storied career as ‘asking questions that other people wanted to know the answers to but were too embarrassed to ask’. While there’s perhaps not that much more to it, there are a few tricks to her trade, and she divulges these in a new book, a sharp-clawed amalgam of greatest-hit interviews, their outtakes and afterlives.
Unfortunately, A Curious Career masquerades as memoir, and as such is likely to disappoint. After a lifetime spent scrutinising others, memoir is not a form that comes easily to Barber, despite the fascination of her first foray, a 2003 Granta essay about a schoolgirl affair with a vastly older con
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Perhaps, rather than having diagnosed a real societal malaise, she has merely projected onto an entire generation a neurosis that actually affects only a small number of people.'
@HoumanBarekat on Patricia Lockwood's 'No One is Talking About This'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/culturecrisis
*Offer ends in TWO days*
Take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/
'Nourished on a diet of exceptionalism and meritocracy, millennials internalised the harmful falsehood that hard work necessarily yields success. The very least they should settle for is a "cool job", one that ... is the focus of their "passion".'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/workers-twerkers