A 970-page victory lap ... Details may be familiar to fans, but for the most part they ring out more resoundingly in Streisand’s chatty, ellipses-strewn telling. She may possess megawatt fame ...but between these covers she’s just Bubbe Barbra at a kitchen table ... Future editions, then, might excise some of the long block quotes of praise from her peers ... There’s something exuberant and glorious, though, about Streisand’s photo dump of self-portraits and party pics. Indeed about this whole dragged-out banquet of a book. You might not have the appetite to linger for the whole thing, but you’ll find something worth a nosh.
Streisand will have not only the last word; she will have the most words, and also the most true ones ... Streisand’s chatty, discursive presence hums on every page. She’s especially fond of ellipses and parentheticals, which give her the freedom to plow ahead with abandon and the permission to scoop up stray details as she remembers them ... Streisand often seems just about to swerve into nonsense, then steers herself back to the point ... Something incredibly rare. Call it the diva’s memoir, an act of bravura entertainment and impossible stamina. The diva’s memoir is, by definition, a somewhat delusional form, in that its author lives in a very different world from the rest of us, and has a different sense of scale. Streisand is not here to apologize or to excavate her pain ... Would we want anything less? Streisand has never thought it necessary to contain herself, and there’s no reason to start now.
1,000 pages of...gumption, her rhythmic Brooklyn cadence communicated via countless ellipses and more than a few pleasant divergences on her favorite kind of egg roll or a particularly good antique shopping trip ... It's a distinct pleasure to look back with My Name Is Barbra and marvel at how the real she came to be.
I have spent the past several days reading it, so perhaps you don’t have to, though there is a lot to love in it (for everyone but Mandy Patinkin and some others) ... You must let Barbra brag on herself, not directly but in the form of an ongoing fount of testimonials from the many people who have been touched by her.
Ms. Streisand is a woman of many talents. Curating memories of the way she was—well, that isn’t one of them ... Plaintive observation[s] would have packed a greater punch had it not been buried in an avalanche of minutiae ... There may be gold there, but readers will have to pan diligently ... Doesn’t have an index, so there are no shortcuts for impatient readers ... Even her most devoted followers will be crying uncle or, more to the point, Yentl.
Her autobiography matches the commanding noise she makes. Almost 1,000 pages long, it lacks an index because Streisand...insists on directing the way we read and debars us from looking up titbits about her adolescent exploits as a shoplifter ... Ultimately, it all turns deliriously mystical, as if Streisand really were orchestrating nature ... There is bawdy, messy comedy here as well as blissed-out Californian rapture. Singers are oral compulsives, and what comes out of Streisand’s mouth is matched by what has gone into it ... At its best, My Name Is Barbra confides her insecurities and a ravening hunger for fame that can never atone for the neglect she suffered as a child. She even wonders if the voice that thrilled the world is the accidental product of a deviated septum and of the air passages in her kinked nose. Let the mystery remain unsolved. What matters is that she sang, and now she no longer does. It’s some compensation to read her silent but eloquent and vociferous writing.
A heifer of a read. The prose throughout is clean and unfussy, though seldom chatty. With the extra girth comes weightier expectations, and while the book obviously holds deep significance to its author – Streisand has been working on the memoir for a quarter of a century – this is rarely more profound or revealing than other far shorter celeb-penned books out this year ... The thousand-odd pages...narrate the life of a woman whose facial features could not have been more irrelevant to her gifts. Perhaps that’s ultimately the thing with My Name is Barbra: there’s no real way of translating Streisand’s captivating screen power to print. Even with 1,000 words more, I don’t think you could manage it.
...in this doorstop of a book there are only a few moments where one imagines the legend of theatre, film and music hesitating to share something that might position her as anything other than an in-control icon-in-the-making. The sheer ambition of this intricately woven memoir, though, makes it a fascinating read ... The Streisand of the Sixties and Seventies was a sensation beyond exaggeration. She's simply documenting it, quoting piece after piece so that, perhaps, she doesn't have to say it herself. The ego is, thankfully, balanced rather deftly with truly tender recollections of those who have touched her life out of the limelight ... It is impossible not to balk at the book's sheer size. The delicate pages (all 992 of them) bring to mind a Russian novel or, perhaps more appropriately for the many who view Streisand as akin to a deity, a bible. And yet, Streisand writes relatively succinctly, with warmth and wit ... For the Streisand super fan, this is a dream come true. An encyclopaedia-sized ode to a remarkable woman, by that remarkable woman, that only ignores questions that they would never be so inelegant as to ask. They do not expect modesty from their queen, and they will not be disappointed. But there's much to enjoy for the more casual reader.
Barely a page goes past without some evidence of her need to control ... No reasonable person would deny this is an incredible story ... Written in plain chatty language much at home to parentheses and exclamation points, My Name is Barbra is exhaustive (not to say exhausting) in its treatment of struggles.
Chatty and sincere, the book reads like a conversation, complete with asides and self-corrections ... The effect is like she's sharing coffee cake with us ... It feels like it's Streisand telling us all the things she's wanted to say for all of her 81 years on Earth ... If you've ever been a fan, even if it has been a while, I can't imagine you'd want to miss it.
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 10th hour slid into the 11th, then the 12th, my primary feeling wasn’t boredom. It was fandom. Long live Barbra Streisand. May she write 1,000 pages more.
Most celebrity memoirs rely on a certain amount of pre-existing goodwill to shunt readers through the more banal parts. With Streisand, this principle is stretched to such a degree that by the end of the book, one is left in a state of wonder – at the accomplishments of an American icon, yes, but also at the sheer volume of detail passed on. While visualising the star in her various guises, another image came to mind as I was reading: that of an editor in an office in midtown Manhattan, quietly burying her head in her hands. The extent to which you are able to find this endearing will probably come down to how endearing you find Streisand herself. Personally, I’m a fan. And for the first half of the book, the story races along with all the charm and energy of its protagonist ... It is only towards the end of the book that the emotional denouement arrives and, for all the absurdity of the wait, I would suggest it’s worth it. In the meantime, there is an awful lot of fun in these pages, particularly in the book’s opening half ... She hardly needs more praise at this point, but hear hear!
...she shows us how she got where she did: by being funny, chatty, glamorous, hard-working and — most importantly — not taking no for an answer ... All this serves to make My Name Is Barbra deeper than the average celebrity memoir because it underlines an old message: you can never have it all ... That kind of straight talking helps Streisand’s enormous memoir not exactly to breeze by, but at least keep the reader feeling that they are in the company of someone real, someone who is giving us the truth. Yes, it is overlong, and the endorsements scattered throughout add nothing, but the writing is great and the likeable, formidable personality shines through.
The experience of reading My Name Is Barbra is delightful; Barbra is good company. The book is written in her own distinct and distinctly Brooklyn syntax ... For a performer with such a distinct personal vision, she was oddly adaptable to cultural trends. Yet too often, Streisand loses sight of the type of work that her talents can best illuminate ... As the 1980s roll on into the 1990s, the picture of Streisand’s life becomes more cloistered. The references in her account become repetitive ... Amusing as this is, the book loses its hold on the reader as Streisand floats far from the ground.
Don’t go expecting false modesty from Streisand in this 1,000-page love letter to herself. And, one might ask, why would you? ... 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, which is peppered with Yiddish phrases throughout, mixes a winning candor with hilariously outlandish self-congratulatory pronouncement ... Throughout this exhaustive, exhausting book, one cannot help but admire her chutzpah.
