My review of My Name Is Barbra, by Barbra Streisand

My Name Is Barbra

by Barbra Streisand

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

There are books that arrive like postcards from a life, and those that arrive like the life itself. This one is of the latter.

Though never an ardent fan, I had watched and admired her climb since learning to walk and talk. All of my ilk recalls 'first seen' TV events, e.g. demise of Monroe, Cuban Missile Crisis ... and so we recall 21-year-old Streisand's iconic 6 October 1963 debut on The Judy Garland Show.

I mean, what 4-year-old future 'Freind of Dorothy' would miss The Judy Garland Show? After its Streisand special episode airing date was pre-announced, it was worse than waiting for Santa!

The pair's counterpoint duet of 'Happy Days Are Here Again' and 'Get Happy' are as vivid today as their co-star Ethel Merman's adjoining trio 'There's No Business Like Show Business'.

And so, from knee-high times, my following of this astonishing persona continued, waxing and waning with the tides.

While some memoirs whisper and others confess, more strive to tidy a life into something manageable. My Name Is Barbra does none of these things, arriving as a grand, unapologetic declaration. 

Sprawling, unruly and unwilling to be pressed into margins.

A tome of nearly a thousand pages, from a woman who has spent her entire existence insisting on the right to be fully seen. A 992-page testimony of the ambition, artistry and sheer force of personality that carried her from a Brooklyn tenement to the summits of world entertainment.

The result feels less like a diary than a museum wing dedicated to a singular life.

Her story begins not with fame but with hunger, the kind that shapes a child before they know they are being shaped. The absence of a father, the chill of her mother’s indifference. These scenes read like old film stills, flickering with the ache of a life yet to find its platform. 

I was surprised to discover that her first ambition was to act rather than sing, the latter seemingly eventuating from lack of acting work, necessitous to survive. Her extraordinary timbre, a secondary consideration to her, was what we all first knew her for.

Her infamous perfectionism, control and refusal to bend to expectation, all trace back to these early years. She writes of these times with startling clarity. Her pain is not romanticised but simply remembered, as one remembers the cold of a winter morning long after the frost has melted.

As the journey moves into her ascent: clubs, auditions, the first glimmers of recognition, her voice becomes sharper and more luminous. She narrates her rise with the precision of one who has spent decades defending her choices and spent a lifetime fighting to be understood. 

Celebrity memoirs rarely feel genuinely authored. This one does. She writes about fame not as a coronation, but a shield. Art became the place she could be seen without being hurt.

It is a book that refuses modesty, abbreviation, or to be anything other than Barbra Streisand. This is not vanity, but preservation. A life lived in the spotlight must be archived before others rewrite it. 

Each chapter feels meticulously placed, each anecdote polished like a stone weighing down her pocket for decades. 

She writes not as a celebrity chasing nostalgia, but an archivist of her own experience, cataloguing camera angles, rehearsal tensions, contracts, wins and losses, all preserved like artifacts beneath glass.

In 1962, as a 19-year-old Broadway neophyte in I Can Get It for you Wholesale, her supporting role of put-upon secretary Miss Marmelsstein had been written as a 50-year-old spinster, but was enlarged for Streisand's casting, landing her a Tony Award nomination.

She proudly recalls Bette Davis's 1964 What’s My Line TV panel show comment: 'I've been seeing plays and uh, have fallen madly in love this week with Barbra Streisand … I think she's the most wonderful thing I've ever seen ... I just sat with my mouth open in awe.'

For readers who value screen craft, the author walks us through the makings of Funny Girl (1968), The Way We Were (1973), A Star Is Born (1976) and Yentl (1983) with levels of detail bordering on the forensic. She guides us through the machinery of creation: the lighting, music and emotional calculus of every scene. 

Not content to just recount what happened, she wants us to understand how. The choices, battles, accidents and miracles.

The star confronts her reputation as a diva amid a whirl of irritation and clarification, humour and weary defiance, arguing that that her assertiveness has long been misread through gendered lenses. 

She knows the word has followed her like a shadow and she knows why: visionary men are tagged geniuses; visionary women are problems.

We read how the Funny Girl stage version had endured protracted out-of-town tryouts, cuts and changes before its 26 March 1963 opening at the Winter Garden Theatre, NYC. She mentions tense onstage dynamics between herself and male lead Sydney (son of Charlie) Chaplin. 

The reader can't help but wonder if that was one example of how, even as a novice leading lady, her creative pushiness rankled with her more established male elders. But Streisand has stated on record that the problem wasn't hers but Chaplin's (much of his material was cut) and that she admired him.

In fact, Variety reported on June 23, 1965, that Chaplin denied rumours he was leaving Funny Girl earlier than contracted due any dispute with Streisand, maintaining that his clash was with the producer, Ray Stark.

Her memoir becomes, in part, a reclamation project, a voice insisting on the right to define her own narrative after decades of being defined by others.

Is it long? Exhaustingly so. A doorstop with a pulse. But its length becomes part of its character, like the ornate spine of an old volume that refuses to be slimmed down for convenience. 

You don’t read this for efficiency; you read it to sit patiently as she tells you all she has ever wanted you to know. You don't read it quickly, you inhabit it.

She has lived a life at full blast, so tells it out loud accordingly. Her winding digressions, protracted parentheses, catalogues of furnishings, salads and wig fibres, become part of the charm.

A feast and a test of endurance, self‑mythology and self‑correction. A diva’s gospel and a woman’s reckoning. It is, above all, unmistakably Barbra: brilliant, controlling, funny, wounded yet triumphant.

It is rare to encounter a memoir where the craft is given as much reverence as the fame. Here, the craft is the fame.

In the end this feels like a well restored sepia photo: cracks still visible, colours still muted, but the subject unmistakably alive. An account of a woman who refused to dim her light for anyone.

As others have noted: if it's modesty you seek, you will not find it here. If it's Barbra, she's with you on every page.