My Name is Barbra
Barbra Streisand
Nov. 7, 2023, Viking
992 pages
Review by: E. Broderick
Anyone who has sent in a book for review knows that while I am an avid reader, I am also a slow one. Mostly because while this blog brings me much personal joy, it’s also my fifth job. Or maybe sixth. At a certain point I stopped counting. Point is, I love books but sometimes it takes me a while to read them. In the case of Barbra Streisand’s autobiography My Name is Barbra, this was compounded by the actually length of the book itself.
This is not a problem. Streisand has done so much in her life – and she’s still going! – it makes sense for the book to be a chonker. However, while there are fiction chonkers that have grabbed my attention and held it so tightly I’ve managed to get through them rapidly, my brain does not work that way with nonfiction. The outcome is already known to me. It’s not a shock for readers that Streisand attains lofty EGOT winner status, or that she ends up married to James Brolin. The interest instead lies in finding out what she herself has to say about this journey. Given it’s almost one thousand pages, I was a little scared I wouldn’t make it though. While that worry proved to be unfounded, it did take me several months. I read history and biography by interspersing it with my fiction reading, either when a book gets so overwhelming I need a mental break or between finishing one book and starting another. It’s almost like a palette cleanser for my brain.
I did make some shocking discoveries along the way. Not about Streisand, but about myself. Turns out I have never actually watched a single Barbra Streisand movie or listened to a single Barbra Streisand song all the way through. I was honestly pretty surprised by that fact, but as I tried to sing past the second bar of ‘Meomories’ or ‘People’ it became obvious. Believe me, nobody was more shocked or embarrassed by this than I was.
I also really, really wish I could tolerate audiobooks. In a departure from most celebrity memoirs, Streisand does not appear to have used a ghost writer. The result is a text that meanders a little bit, and has so much name dropping I felt I needed a chart or cast of characters to keep everyone straight, but is also extremely conversational. At certain points she digresses and then says “but back to” whatever she was initially discussing. This felt very real and authentic, but it also made me think the audiobook would be amazing. Once again, Streisand does the job herself and is the audiobook narrator. This brings a closeness to the audiobook, making it a conversation between the reader and one of the most famous celebrities of our time. I already knew my brain rejects audio, but I tried anyway. Unfortunately, I just can’t process books that way so I went back to reading on paper. If you can listen though – I hugely recommend trying it.
Streisand wanting to do everything herself is a theme of the book. She is a self proclaimed perfectionist and this leads her to take on many different roles in her work in order to get the result she desires. She voices plenty of frustration with people who objected to that, but also easily gives credit to those who approach their work with similar devotion. Seeing how much someone else cared, enabled her to trust them to direct or produce her. I particularly enjoyed hearing about the album GUILTY produced by a Barry Gibb. Maybe that will be the first song I listen to.
There’s more layers to that aspect of the book though. Streisand correctly points out that when her desire to achieve her vision lead her to direct, or to ask for an extra take etc. she often received a very different response than her male counterparts would have received at the time. There was a raw honesty there- especially when she discusses the disastrous Mike Wallace interview and how people struggled to deal with a strong woman- that I admire. It is deplorable that a woman did not win an Oscar for directing until 2010, but fitting that Streisand was the one to present the award. And you know what? That Oscar went to Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker – which I actually did watch, and I thought it was fantastic.
My Name is Barbra is exactly what Streisand promises in the foreword- a way for her to set the record straight in her own words and on her own terms, which is especially important given all the misogynistic and ridiculous things that have been said about her. But it is also exactly what she promises in the conclusion – a work in progress, because she is constantly looking to improve her past projects and frankly because she’s still alive and very active in politics as well as the arts. Having this background, I’m excited to see what she does next. Who knows – maybe I’ll actually watch a movie the whole way through!