Lynn Barber, by her own admission, has always suffered from a compelling sense of nosiness. An exceptionally inquisitive child she constantly questioned everyone she knew about imitate details of their lives. This talent for nosiness, coupled with her unusual lack of the very English fear of social embarrassment, turned out to be the perfect qualification for a celebrity interviewer.
In A Curious Career, Lynn Barber takes us from her early years as a journalist at Penthouse - where she started out interviewing foot fetishists, voyeurs, dominatrices and men who liked wearing nappies - to her later more eminent role interrogating a huge cross-section of celebrities ranging from politicians to film stars, comedians, writers, artists and musicians. A Curious Career is full of glorious anecdotes - the interview with Salvador Dali that, at Dali’s invitation, ended up lasting four days, or the drinking session with Shane MacGowan during which they planned to rob a bank. It also contains eye-opening transcripts, such as her infamous interview with the hilarious and spectacularly rude Marianne Faithfull.
A wonderfully frank and funny memoir by Britain's greatest and most ferocious interviewer, A Curious Career is also a fascinating window into the lives of celebrities and the changing world of journalism.
Product Details
About Lynn Barber
Reviews for Curious Career
Sunday Times
Packed full of incredible stories
Glamour
The book of the career of the ferocious interviewer: what happens, she says, when a nosy child grows up to find her perfect job
Katy Guest
Independent on Sunday
Praise for Lynn Barber: 'Barber's elegant prose radiates love
Jane Shilling
Daily Telegraph
Lots of fun ... very moving
Evening Standard
Funny, bold, incisive, clever and interesting
Independent
Candid, unsentimental and extremely funny. I read it in one glorious go, laughing and crying throughout
Zoe Heller
The queen bee of the celebrity interview
Daily Mail
For a guide [to journalism], there could be no better place to start than with Lynn Barber’s second volume of autobiography, A Curious Career
Olivia Cole
GQ
Funny, thoughtful and beautifully written
Glamour
Barber’s back with a candid and extremely entertaining account of her early career as a celebrity interviewer that’s packed with anecdotes illuminating both her own and her interviewees’ lives ... I read this in a sitting, unable to stop smiling
Women & Home
A riot of a read – funny, irreverent, artlessly frank
Decca Aitkenhead
Guardian
Barber turned the interview into an art form ... Like all the best conjurors, she relies on speed, practice, psychological insight, a powerful imagination and phenomenally acute observation. For nearly half a century she has held up a mirror in which her contemporaries see themselves reflected with a precision and panache most novelists would envy – and most biographers too
Hilary Spurling
Guardian
A terrific read ... Lynn Barber can take an over-interviewed, not-terribly-interesting celebrity and write 5,000 words about them that are so clever, bold and funny you want to read to the very end
Financial Times
For fans of Lynn Barber, A Curious Career will delight and entertain. For anyone contemplating a career in celebrity journalist, it’s absolutely indispensible
Mail on Sunday
Barber brilliantly nails the ghastly black-comedy irrationality of grief and the quietly heroic business of keeping-on keeping-in while everything simultaneously stops making sense ... Barber’s wince-making eloquence on the pain of fresh widowhood lingered long after I finished A Curious Career. And then at the end I felt terribly disappointed; even having read it as slowly as I dared, at 211 pages it was all over far too quickly ... both on the page and in real life, Lynn Barber invariably leaves you wanting more
Sunday Times
Incredibly satisfying and enjoyable: witty, mischievous, insightful, and, one occasion, elegiac ... A veritable masterclass in how it’s done
Rachel Cooke, Observer
She cuts, sparkles, is sometimes generous, never daunted, always full of verve ... Readers will love this pacy, absorbing book
Independent
A hugely enjoyable read – the gold standard of professional prying
Evening Standard