Barbra Streisand lays out her claim to be one of the greatest of all time

MEMOIR
My Name is Barbra
Barbra Streisand
Century, $75

George Bernard Shaw never wrote “thought transcends matter”, as Barbra Streisand always believed. Nor did anyone else she could find as she researched her appropriately huge and fearless autobiography. Turns out even the inspirational aphorism that bolstered her anxious childhood was wishful thinking. Talk about writing your own script.

It’s not so much the matter of her life and work that dazzles here. Spanning a relentless six-plus decades, the sheer weight of stage and TV shows, albums, films and awards; crusades fought and ceilings smashed sealed her legend long ago. The intensity of thought, though, that she brings to each in turn over her thousand-page story underscores a depth of artistry that boggles the mind all over again.

“I’m a person who gets involved in every detail,” she writes in the midst of a three-chapter deconstruction of Yentl, the first movie she directed (also co-wrote, produced and starred in). The evidence is in her retelling, which begins the night she read Isaac Bashevis-Singer’s short story and ends, 15 years and 100 pages later, with five Oscar nominations, a profound philosophical education and hard-won convictions about women’s equality.

This particular detail she refers to is one minuscule aspect of set design, one of countless meticulously considered ideas she unravels before our eyes. Casting, music, lighting, photography, editing, publicity, budgeting, theology, politics, misogyny, infantile collaborators, seasick extras, acceptable catering … Her learning curve is so intimately observed it becomes our own. But the vision, courage and passion against systemic, sometimes vicious opposition? That’s just Barbra.

Her exterior life, by comparison, is recounted in episodes that almost feel rushed in her haste to get to the work. Her father died when she was a baby. Her mother withheld love and stewed in jealousy as her daughter’s divine voice fast-tracked her dreams.

Singing was only a means to Streisand’s acting ambitions, which unfurled fast after her first Broadway musical at 19. Her trip from “interesting-looking” wannabe writing unsent letters to Lee Strasberg on the Brooklyn subway to darling of a smitten Hollywood A-list is a fait accompli years before Funny Girl makes her a movie star at 26.