A Curious Career by Lynn Barber; book review

The interviewing legend that is Lynn Barber styles herself as the queen of nosiness, a virtue she credits for launching and sustaining her career for a good five decades. Indeed, A Curious Career, the latest instalment of her strung-out autobiography, pays tribute to The Value of Nosiness in the very first chapter.

But I can trump even Barber’s curiosity: reading one of her 5,000-word-masterclasses-in-interview-writing, what I want is not so much her finely honed views about that week’s victim, sorry, subject, but what she’s left out. I am greedy for unadulterated Barber; I want to know how she gets from the frankly awkward situation of walking into a room with someone you know only from TV or the stage, to being able to ask them if they were breastfed – a question she claims as a fall-back.

In other words, I’m waiting for the accompanying CD or, more aptly, cassette tape, as Barber described how she likes to watch the wheels turn as she fires questions. Granted, in some cases listening back would be a marathon affair – she describes an early interview with Salvador Dali lasting for days – but oh for the insights it would yield.

This isn’t to criticise what she has written, which spans interview tips and tricks to coping with her husband David’s sudden death in 2003. Her honesty includes admitting being star-struck by Jarvis Cocker, to loathing interviewing actors (“the bane of my life”). She hates, too, her nickname “Demon Barber” for implying that she only does hatchet jobs.

But given her infamous take-downs, – notably of Marianne Faithfull and Rafael Nadal of all people – she leaves me wondering quite why her victims, sorry, that word again, keep putting themselves forward. Other omissions include reprinting that interview with Dali, and expanding on the book’s most intriguing confession, which comes after her younger daughter mixes up Christopher Hitchins, her mother’s interviewee, with the actor Christopher Biggins, who had recently been on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! “I wondered, not for the first time, how I could have so failed to educate my daughters,” Barber writes, prompting the question, what else was she referring to?

Women, in particular, can draw solace from Barber’s career glittering brightest as her decades advance. She returned to Fleet Street aged 38, which revelation alone makes me want to kiss her.

But this is no An Education, her rather more salacious first volume of autobiography, and, given how many interviews she reproduces, the book itself is rather thin. Still, there’s always next week’s victim, sorry, target, to look forward to instead.