Streisand knows that there is something socially “tone deaf” about her. She talks about this at length in her book. Throughout her life, she just can’t seem to tell the public what they want to hear. Early on, the press would ask if she was thrilled with her success, implicitly demanding a “golly gee whiz, I sure am” response. She just couldn’t give it. While on Broadway starring in Funny Girl, she’d say things like, “I always knew I would be famous, but to be honest I hate performing the same show every night.” That’s not how you play the game.
Why do people mind Barbra Streisand’s self-regard? What does it cost them? In the memoir, and throughout the years, she is sometimes dazzled by her own success, and the world responds with, “Who does she think she is?” She doesn’t express the humility we would like her to express. She should be grateful to us, we imply with our disapproval. She should know her place, which is at the tip of our sword—we want her to sing for her life, recognizing that we could just as easily slit her throat as knight her with that blade.But one must kneel to be knighted. Barbra Streisand prefers to keep her chin up. She rose to the top on wings of sheer self-belief, against all advice and in the absence of a single forebear who looked or sounded like her. She needed the world because she needed its recognition, but she was the one with the superior vision, not us. The world stretched to accommodate her original presence (and benefited!). She did not stoop to accommodate it.
So, while I would never join the haters in their scoffing, the scope of this near-thousand-page tome engenders in me a fraught appreciation of the Streisand star-image. Mine is a pleasure/pain which emerges precisely from the same root as the word count. Greatness is Streisand’s right to claim in terms of talent and scope of accomplishment: Broadway, recording, television, film—acting, directing, writing, composing, producing. She is as significant as she believes, and one should mistrust the drive to diminish her self-regard or put her in her “place.” In fact, Streisand is vital, in part, because understanding the discourse around her forces us to grapple with the implications of our culture’s tendency to do just that.
WHEN I READ that Barbra Streisand’s memoir, My Name Is Barbra (2023), would be 970 pages long, a devilish chuckle bubbled up from deep within me. There was something ecstatic about this moment—How pharaonic the ambition! What an absolute thrill that a woman famous for show business—and not, say, the Nobel Peace Prize—believes her life story worthy of such an expansive word count. I am grateful that someone, somewhere, isn’t endlessly struggling to feign correct attitudes, that someone believes there is time and space to read 970 pages about the life and times of Barbra Streisand, one of those someones being Barbra Streisand.
