A Curious Career By Lynn Barber

If Lynn Barber had named this book A Glorious Career, it would have been an even more fitting title. In this, the second part of her memoirs (the first, An Education, dealt with her schoolgirl experiences at the hands of a predatory conman), she recounts her years as a journalist – from the early days fending off interviewees who presumed that her job at Penthouse made her fair game to the latter years when she earned the sobriquet Demon Barber for her often caustic observations about her interview subjects. Whatever your feelings about Barber and her interrogation methods, she has produced some of the most incisive and entertaining profiles in an era when puff pieces and ditsy, inane ramblings tend to swamp much of so-called celebrity journalism. In these pages we learn that Barber loves interviewing artists, but is reluctant to meet sports people (because they “never seem to have anything interesting to say”). She also finds actors “difficult”, not because they don’t talk but because so much of what they say boils down to “stale old anecdotes”. Some of her old interviews are reprinted to back up her observations about her craft, and she delights in the fact that she has made a long and successful career out of being nosy. If I had one complaint about this book, it’s that it is simply not long enough.

Her By Harriet Lane

Harriet Lane seems to specialize in unsettling, hard-to-like female characters who get too close and too involved in the lives of others. Nina, the mother of a teenager, is sophisticated and seems in control of all aspects of her life. When she sees harassed mother Emma in the street one day, there is a spark of instant recognition, but Emma doesn’t seem to remember her. Little by little, Nina inveigles herself into Emma’s life, making herself indispensable in some ways, but also carrying out little terrorist strikes of mischief, and generally behaving in a quite insidious manner. Throughout, she makes veiled references to an apparently life-changing event from the past, for which she clearly holds Emma culpable. If Emma had her full wits about her, she would probably be able to see Nina for the threat she poses, but she is enveloped in that fug of early childhood lethargy – dealing with a toddler and pregnancy – where she literally can’t remember what she has done that day. Her is the kind of book that creeps up on you, much like Nina herself, and you may find it difficult to put down as the sense of menace grows ever more threatening.