Life
My Name is Barbra review: Streisand’s 1,000-page love letter to herself
The superstar’s mother of all memoirs is hilariously replete with self-congratulation
November 17, 2023 10:01
The superstar’s mother of all memoirs is hilariously replete with self-congratulation
November 17, 2023 10:01My Name is Barbra
by Barbra Streisand
Century, £35
Before anyone had heard of Barbra Streisand, she was just another wannabe actress, trying and failing miserably to break into Broadway. Then she was offered a weekly stint at the famous New York nightclub the Bon Soir.
In just a few short weeks, she became a sensation.
“I was starting to develop a following,” she writes in this much-anticipated warts-and-all memoir. “I heard that the people were coming to the club just to see me.”
Don’t go expecting false modesty from Streisand in this 1,000-page love letter to herself.
Streisand receiving the Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama (Photo: Getty Images)
And, one might ask, why would you?
After all, she is one of the last remaining bona fide Hollywood stars – an EGOT winner (the achievement of having won all four of the major American entertainment awards) who has not only made roles in musicals such as Funny Girl and Hello, Dolly! her own but who, when not starring in films such as Yentl and The Way We
Were, can also be found behind the camera.
Blowing her own trumpet is something that comes very easily to Streisand in this book; and she does so with characteristic nonchalance.
My Name is Barbra begins with a thankfully brief account of her childhood in Brooklyn. She lost her father at a very young age, and when years later she asked her mother Diana why she refused to talk about her deceased husband, her mother replied, “I didn’t want you to be sad.” Streisand’s relationship with her mother — a former soprano who failed to break it in the business — would remain fraught throughout her life.
Diana, she tells us, was never complimentary about her daughter’s achievement and rarely missed a moment to belittle them. “Why would they pay you so much to sing?” she once asked her. It doesn’t take a shrink to understand what role this might have played in Streisand’s hunger for stardom.
Elsewhere, My Name is Barbra attempts to settle a few scores. Streisand regularly berates those who have made a career out of her name by peddling lies in numerous unauthorised biographies.
But the book is most juicy on the subject of Streisand’s various affairs and friendships. Barely out of her teens, Barbra met and fell madly in love with actor Elliott Gould, a man whose career she never tires of telling us never managed to match her own.
