Barbra Streisand Has a Very Particular Reputation. Her Book Convinced Me It’s All Wrong.

Barbra Streisand is a woman who needs no introduction. Usually. As it happens, until this week, I knew almost nothing about Barbra Streisand. I guess it’s partly that she’s a little less famous where I’m from, the United Kingdom, and that I’m not much into musical theater. I knew she was in Meet the Fockers, and I had half a memory of something about her having a miniature mall underneath her house. In my head, her name sat alongside the words diva and demanding, although I couldn’t tell you why. And so, when I learned that she had a memoir out, the first she’s ever written, at 81, and saw that it was 1,000 pages long, I thought, Jesus Christ. A thousand pages? What has anybody got to say that would take a thousand pages? Who is this woman?

And then that question became compelling to me. What kind of impression would someone get of Barbra Streisand, by all accounts a legend, and one of the most famous people in the world, from a starting place of no knowledge whatsoever, just from reading all 1,000 pages of her memoir? Whom does Barbra Streisand want to tell us that she is, in her own words?

I timed myself reading and estimated that it would take me 16 hours to finish My Name Is Barbra. I wasn’t proposing to do these 16 hours consecutively, because I’m not a psychopath, but still, it was daunting. That’s a lot of time to spend with anybody. I thought it would probably be kind of interesting in parts, mostly a slog. Then I’d write something complaining about how the book is self-indulgent and too long, and that would be that. Here is an account of how something else happened entirely.

By the end of the first few hours of reading, I knew some basic info about Streisand. She grew up in Brooklyn, her father died when she was young, she loves food and beautiful clothing. She doesn’t know how to cook, which is quite chic I think, and she grew her nails out long so she would never have to type and become a secretary as her mother wanted her to, which is chicer still. She has attended exactly one singing lesson in her lifetime. She has been told variously by people that she is beautiful, but also that she looks like an “amiable anteater” and a “seasick ferret,” that her face has a “look in repose” that “is the essence of hound.”

She is also a person who knows what she wants and never really doubts that she is going to get it. In one extraordinary early anecdote, Streisand recalls when she was working as an usher in a movie theater, long before she had even played her first role. “I would hide my face because I was pretty sure I would be famous some day and didn’t want anybody remembering that I had shown them to their seats.”

There are many, many quotations in this book of people saying how great she is. Glowing reviews of her time as a singer in residence at the Bon Soir club in New York, where someone predicts (accurately) that she’s going to EGOT, and of her early Broadway musical roles, like I Can Get It for You Wholesale and Funny Girl. Her audition for the former was apparently so good that the producer said to one of the stage managers, “Don’t let her go. In fact, lock the door.” Praise for her performance is also the beginning of her first marriage, to the actor Elliott Gould, who rang her up after this audition and said, “I’m Elliott Gould. I was there this afternoon and I thought you were brilliant,” before hanging up. It began to piss me off, all this tooting of her own horn.

It was only after the fifth hour of reading that I decided I had to actually see what all the fuss was about. So I watched Funny Girl. And I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She has a charisma that blinds you. Then I watched The Way We Were, then A Star Is Born, all in one weekend. If I wrote a memoir, would I pack it quite so full of people saying I’m amazing? Probably not. But I wouldn’t be able to. She can, because for a good 60 years, people haven’t been able to stop saying it. And they’re right. She is, plainly, jaw-droppingly talented.

And the majority of the massive length of the book doesn’t come from her parroting praise for her work. It comes from the enormous level of detail she goes into about her process: crafting the performances of songs for her albums, then, later, how she works as a director, shot by shot, down to the individual lenses on the cameras. It is around here, in my ninth hour of reading, when Streisand recounts the story of her directorial debut, Yentl, that I felt the first dangerous flickerings of a full-blown obsession. What do you mean she also wrote, starred in, and produced it? What do you mean she draws her own clothes and then asks Donna Karan to make them for her? What do you mean she wanted a Modigliani painting so badly that she taught herself to paint and made her own replica?!

I thought back to my first impression of her, picked up by cultural osmosis, that she was a diva. The portrait of Streisand that comes through in this memoir is one of someone who needs and demands creative control of her work. She micromanages her albums, her TV specials, her films. Like many of the characters she plays, Streisand wants everything and isn’t going to settle for less. It kills more than one of her relationships, her obsession with her work, but she chooses the work. I guess this is what culture does to women artists who are too good at what they do: call them difficult. It comes up in the book again and again, and, understandably, she still has a real bee in her bonnet about this stuff. While shooting Yentl, rumors go ’round in the press that she’s demanding and difficult to work with. The British production staff writes a letter to the London Times saying otherwise, she tells us, but it is never printed.

There is also plenty of celebrity gossip to sustain you along the way. She had romances with Marlon Brando, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and a 28-years-younger Andre Agassi, to name a few—all before her current, blissfully happy 25-year marriage to James Brolin—and she can’t remember whether she slept with Warren Beatty, but it’s possible. There is her fascinating and tragic relationship with her mother, too, a woman who could never bring herself to express pride in Streisand. And as a casual reader, you need these juicy bits, because there is a lot of more-technical material here for the true film and musical theater nerds. But as the 10^th hour slid into the 11^th, then the 12^th, my primary feeling wasn’t boredom. It was fandom. Long live Barbra Streisand. May she write 1,000 pages more.