A Curious Career review – sharp cuts from Lynn Barber

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/11/curious-career-review-sharp-cuts-lynn-barber

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Lynn Barber believes that she owes her career as a newspaper interviewer, at least in part, to her childhood, which was at once perfectly ordinary and strikingly odd. She grew up an only child in a perfectly ordinary Edwardian house in a perfectly ordinary Twickenham street, and in the 50s, too – a decade in which perfect ordinariness was the sine qua non of successful suburban life. Her mother taught elocution, and her father was a civil servant. Yet only rarely was she inclined to invite other girls from her posh school over for tea. Her parents had no family and seemingly no friends, and as a result of this relative isolation their behaviour could seem odd, even alarming, to outsiders. God forbid that someone might pop over for a glass of orange squash only to find her father doing the ironing while singing the song Hitler Has Only Got One Ball. "We were not the sort of family you came across in Enid Blyton," she writes. "Or indeed anywhere as far as I could see."

Not unnaturally, Barber was curious to know how other families lived, and she was always asking questions. Her friends thought this quite weird: why did she want to know whether their fathers kissed their mothers when they came home from work? But it was also useful: "I was always the one deputed to ask Virginia if she'd snogged the Hampton Grammar boy who took her to the cinema last night." Combine this intense nosiness and flagrant lack of inhibition with the fallout from her teenage love affair with an older conman – a relationship she detailed in her 2009 memoir, An Education, and which taught her that people are not always what they seem – and you have pretty much all the qualifications a good interviewer needs. (Though a working knowledge of libel law is always a plus.)

Her first job after Oxford was on Penthouse, where she spent most of her time talking to people with unusual sexual fetishes – though happily, Bob Guccione, its proprietor, also dispatched her to meet Salvador Dalí in Paris. There, she struck gold with her first question, about his habits – "Ha-beets! Ha! First, masturbation… Zee painters are always zee big masturbators…" – and the die was cast. Once her daughters were safely at school, she worked at the Sunday Express, and then at the Independent, which was where she made her name (she would go on to join the Observer, and is now at the Sunday Times). As she found her voice – her interviews were not respectful transcripts, but mesmerising encounters in which, like a wrestler, she was wont to fling her subjects against the ropes – older hacks would warn her about objectivity. Thankfully, she ignored them. Like any good writer, she is entirely on the side of the reader, who expects and deserves to be entertained. Nowadays the only people she flatly refuses to interview are those she doesn't think "are worth five pages" of the reader's attention.

Personally, I'm not sure the actor Martin Clunes is worth five pages of the reader's time (A Curious Career, which is in essence a short guide to the art of the newspaper interview, is punctuated with some of Barber's greatest hits – or perhaps not, in the case of Clunes). But we all of us have our blind spots. Barber is, or was, daffy for Doc Martin, the TV series in which he stars, and was somewhat startled to be on the receiving end of his excessive grumpiness and unwarranted dislike. I think, too, that she is prone to lose her critical faculties when it comes to her beloved Young British Artists (YBAs). "I have never so much since school wanted to call someone my friend," she writes breathlessly of Sarah Lucas in the chapter on artists. When Lucas, having spent two hours sticking Marlboro Lights to an inflated lifejacket, murmurs something trite about the cigarettes representing self-destruction and the lifejacket a false hope of salvation, Barber doesn't, as they say in the art world, interrogate her practice; she accepts the statement at face value, her only comment being that Lucas's reluctance fully to explain her ideas did not make for the best kind of interview.

But this is nitpicking. Better enthusiasm than cynicism, and at least her unlikely passions have the very useful function of reminding her detractors that her dial isn't always set to demon. A Curious Career, though somewhat slim, is incredibly satisfying  and enjoyable: witty, mischievous, insightful, and, on occasion, elegiac. Her interview with Marianne Faithfull for the Observer is still a delicious car crash, more than a decade after it was published, and I adored her account of the times she spent with the hymn-singing Muriel Spark (the novelist took Barber to her favourite dress shop in Valdarno, Italy, where she forced her to try on various ghastly mother-of-the-bride outfits; she only escaped by buying a pair of trousers). Those who don't believe she can induce a lump in the reader's throat should turn to her tender but utterly unsentimental interview with Christopher Hitchens, a veritable masterclass in how it's done.

I expect some reviewers will see this book as required reading for journalism students, and it's true that Barber has sage advice about such things as tape recorders (use two) and the best kind of question (be open-ended, the better to encourage words of more than one syllable). But the people who should really be force fed it are those in desk jobs fairly high up the media food chain: the ones who commission and edit. Barber has righteous things to say about copy approval, phone interviews and pieces that are written too hastily, without any real research or thought, all of which result in interviews that are at best insipid and at worst soporific. In the 21st century, newspapers certainly have their problems. Unfortunately, they're also their own worst enemy. Who wants to spend hard-earned cash on something that's going to bore them to sobs? Barber doesn't, and you feel this in every enticing and naughty paragraph she writes.