My Name Is Barbra

“For forty years, publishers have been asking me to write my autobiography. But I kept turning them down, because I prefer to live in the present rather than dwell on the past. And the fact is, I’m scared that after six decades of people making up stories about me, I’m going to tell the truth, and nobody is going to believe it.”

Streisand’s fear that no one will believe her if she tells the truth emphasizes the dichotomy between her true self and the public’s perception of her. This also gives insight into her outlook on life: She prefers to live her life rather than reflect on her past.

“When I watched other performers, some of them seemed odd to me. They were so eager to please the audience, telling them how great they were, saying things like, ‘I only feel alive when I’m onstage.’ […] It made me squirm. Even though deep down, I might have been more needy than they were. I just didn’t believe you should show it.”

This excerpt shows Streisand’s complicated relationship with performing. Though she loves creating art, the fulfillment she gets comes from herself rather than others. Even so, she still feels a need to connect with her audiences, something she continues to struggle with throughout her career.

“I think it was on this trip that someone asked me, ‘How do you hold a note so long?’ After a moment of thought, I said, ‘Because I want to.’ It’s a matter of will…I wanted to hold the note, so I did. But then I started thinking about it and wondering, How did I hold a note? And what had been an unconscious, effortless thing suddenly became conscious…and I couldn’t do it anymore.”

Streisand fundamentally believes that she can will things into existence and that her success happened just because she believes in herself. However, Streisand also struggles with the act of performing when her confidence is shaken; here, becoming self-conscious about the physiology and psychology of singing negatively affects her ability to do so. From this point on, she has trouble holding a note too long because she is thinking about it too hard.

“It’s so ironic. I was the star of a hit show, but every night I couldn’t wait for it to be over. I had gotten my wish…I was famous, I suppose, because the newspapers and magazines seemed to track my every move. But the reporters still twisted my words or misinterpreted them to give the article a negative slant.”

Streisand emphasizes her disdain for her fame. Though she has gotten everything she wanted, she is nevertheless bored with her job and feels victimized by the reporters who spread rumors about her. This also highlights her strong feelings about the truth and how personally she takes the twisting of her words.

“Suddenly I had a reputation for being rude, when I was really just scared. I didn’t realize that it might be wise to try to do something to change it. Not that I would even know how…I had already learned that most reporters had some preconceived idea of me, and that’s what they were going to write. It almost didn’t matter what I actually said. They weren’t really listening. And they weren’t going to be positive, because it’s much harder to make a positive piece interesting. It’s the negative pieces that get all the attention.”

Streisand has a complex relationship with the press. Though she wants to be perceived as likable, her direct manner does not appear so to journalists, who are used to dismissing forthright women as demanding, controlling, or diva-like. Her disillusionment with the press also comes from the fact that she knows that no matter what she does, positive reporting about her will get less attention than negative.

“Part of my brain was thinking, Why does he want to be with me? And then I remembered, Oh yeah. I’m what’s her name. I’ve made movies, sold a lot of albums. So why wouldn’t he want to be with me?”

Streisand does not feel connected to her public image, seeing this persona as separate from her everyday lived experience. Several times in the memoir, she discusses instances when she forgot she was a household name, only thinking that she is an ordinary person. The quote also shows how her confidence fluctuates due to her internal struggles with self-worth.

“Sometimes people will even ask me to sing, as if I were some sort of performing seal. They think it’s easy, but it’s not. I don’t sing at home, I don’t sing in the shower, and I don’t sing at parties. So, to just stand up and sing something for a stranger? You might as well ask me to jump off a bridge. But if you don’t comply with their request, some people can turn on you and get nasty, saying they’re not going to buy your records anymore. In a way, they think they own you, because they paid for that album.”

This excerpt highlights Streisand’s complex relationships with fame and performing, along with her conviction that celebrities are just regular people when not specifically living the thing they are famous for. She has a hard time when people, especially strangers, try to both put her on a pedestal and demand things from her. Streisand’s relationship with singing, especially earlier in her career, has been similarly complicated: She appreciates her talent, but does not want to be known for her voice alone.

“When you’re a performer, the shadow you cast is much bigger than you, the actual person. People blow you up and project all kinds of things onto you, which often have nothing to do with who you really are.”

Here, Streisand is describing a painting that projects its subject matter as larger than life. She uses this image when describing many of her projects, as she believes it symbolically resonates with her beliefs about performing. Streisand’s memoir reveals how much simpler her life is than many others have made it out to be.

“For years, whenever I read something about myself that was completely untrue, my first impulse was to correct it. But Marty would talk me down and advise me to ignore it. […] But lies make me mad, and it irked me that all this nonsense was in the public record. Some people thrive on publicity, but I hired a press agent to keep me out of the press.”

This quote shows how strongly Streisand believes in telling the absolute truth. She sets the record straight about many of the rumors about her in this memoir, and this excerpt shows that she has always wanted the truth about her to be known. This also highlights the conflict between being a private person and being a celebrity: Streisand had to hire someone to specifically limit the press she received.

“But that’s the fun of directing. It was thrilling to shape it and refine it and watch it come together. I think that’s why acting alone had become kind of boring to me. I always liked looking at the entire picture. I was concerned with the whole story. And now I felt like a painter with a fresh canvas, only this time I held the brush in my hand.”

Creative control is of paramount importance to Streisand—seeking, getting, and retaining it is a core throughline in the memoir. Throughout her career, Streisand has felt that she could only realize her creative vision when she had full control of the art she was producing. She finally experiences this level of oversight when she writes, directs, produces, and stars in Yentl.

“I can only make films about things that are very personal to me. In Yentl I created a father and I made him in the image of my own, even naming him Mendel, the Hebrew version of Emanuel. In many ways I think I’ve spent most of my life trying to regain what was lost…to attain the unattainable. But one thing I learned from directing this movie was that I had to be my own father. I couldn’t look for a man to save me. We make our own fate, and I was ready to take responsibility.”

Though her father died when she was young, Emanuel influenced Streisand’s life heavily. She feels she has regained a connection with him in many ways while making Yentl, a film she sees as representative of her father’s dedication to scholarship and his views on life. Just as Yentl must dress as a man to study, Streisand symbolically becomes her own father to shepherd this movie from idea to fully realized artistic product.

“I probably fuss too much, but I have to follow my own instincts. After all, this is the ultimate performance that will last forever. It’s like capturing time. And I believe that it’s worth any effort to try to get it right. And then I hope other people will like it as well.”

This quote succinctly summarizes what others often view as Streisand’s overbearing fixation on the details of her films. She has been accused of doing too much by many directors and co-workers—a charge that is highly gendered, as male directors who focus on minutiae are not considered divas. Here, she justifies her level of involvement because a film remains the same forever and she wants her art to be as honest as possible.

“Nothing works if you lie. No meaning will transmit, and the audience doesn’t feel anything. As an actress, you could have perfect lighting, or as a singer, the best sound, but if there’s no truth to the performance, you have nothing. So technology isn’t everything. A scene can be imperfectly shot, but if it has truth at its core…that’s enough. Truth is universal. It hits home. It touches people’s hearts and minds.”

Streisand’s interest in honesty and truth-telling is reflected in her art. Though the press often misconstrues her words, when she has control over what she makes, she uses it to tell the absolute truth as she sees it. She frequently discusses how her acting in the first take of a scene is often the best, as it is the one where she feels the emotions of the character most fully.

“I think it’s very hard to live in the real world sometimes. As I once said to a therapist, ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m going a bit mad.’ And he said, ‘We’re all mad. You’re mad. I’m mad. The only difference is I respect my madness.’ That was very revealing. I thought, Oh, it’s okay. It’s not only me, but also people in all walks of life who feel this way, and maybe it’s not such a terrible thing.”

Streisand often feels singled out due to her fame, though she frequently describes herself as ordinary. In this quote, she insists that her feelings are valid and that she is just like anyone else.

“I’m a truth teller, and I’ve been crucified for it many times. I have opinions. I talk out of turn. I complain. Early on in my career, a reporter was following me around in Europe for an article, and I had to cut the interview short because I had a headache. I was simply telling her the truth. But her attitude was basically, You’re rich and famous and you’re not allowed to have a headache. What she didn’t understand was a headache is a headache. It hurts.”

This quote highlights Streisand’s disillusionment with fame. She implies throughout her memoir that fame and truth are often at odds with one another, especially when it comes to public representations of successful women. It is clear that her public image has overshadowed the fact that she is a regular human being for the reporter who refuses to sympathize with her physical ailment. Streisand attempts to humanize herself throughout the memoir to counteract these beliefs about famous people.

“I’ve come to realize that I can’t control what people say about me or write about me. I don’t like to give interviews, because my words are often taken out of context. The only thing I can control is my work, and that’s why I pay a lot of attention to it.”

Streisand often struggles with a specific double bind. Though she can’t control how she is portrayed in the media, she can completely control her art—though she then gets criticized for taking too much control of the art she produces. Regardless, she insists on the importance of minute attention to detail as a marker of a dedicated creator.

“Eventually I grew into my face, I guess. Or maybe it was something deeper. Now, when I had finally stopped worrying about whether I was attractive or not, when I had stopped putting myself down and saw myself in a better light, so did the magazines. They were actually using words like ‘beautiful’ and ‘glamorous’ to describe me. That was refreshing, and I thought, Well, it must be a reflection of how I’m feeling. I think the world mirrors what we feel about ourselves. When a woman feels pretty, the world sees her as pretty.”

This realization is pivotal for Streisand, whose looks have been criticized throughout her career. Like a few of the characters she plays in her films, Streisand’s newfound security with herself and her looks projects outward.

“Around this same time, someone told me a joke that was going around about me: A man was choking to death in a restaurant and Barbra Streisand was sitting at the next table. She rushed over and did the Heimlich maneuver and saved his life. Next day the headline read: BARBRA STREISAND TAKES THE FOOD RIGHT OUT OF A PERSON’S MOUTH. You can’t win.”

This joke emphasizes how Streisand has been portrayed in the press—as an attention-sucking diva. In the joke, as in her life, when Streisand does something good, she is still criticized because her positive intentions are purposely misconstrued to accord with her public image as a difficult woman. By including this joke in her memoir, Streisand shows her sense of humor about herself and her fame: She has conceded that “you can’t win” when it comes to how she is presented.

“The fact that she couldn’t be bothered to be there on one of the most important nights of my life was like a slap in the face. It was as if she was sending me a message: Maybe other people think you’re so great, but I don’t. But here’s the funny thing. I never thought I was great. That’s what she never understood.”

This quote gets to the root of Streisand’s complicated relationship with her mother. When Diana doesn’t come to Streisand’s first concert in years, Streisand is especially wounded because all she wants is her mother’s support. Streisand feels deeply misunderstood by Diana, who believes Streisand is the diva she is often portrayed as and resents her daughter’s career successes.

“I have great respect for artists. Their work gives us a reflection of the times, and sometimes they challenge us to see what others would prefer to ignore […] Artists can be a country’s conscience. That’s why art is the enemy of tyrants and dictators. When politicians denounce artists and defund the arts, it’s time to change the politicians.”

This excerpt shows the core of Streisand’s beliefs about mixing art and politics. Since art is “a reflection of the time” in which it’s made, she believes it is the duty of artists to challenge accepted norms, regressive politicians, and inequity. By including this call to action in her memoir, she continues to infuse a political message into her work.

“If I could change one thing about myself (actually, there are many), I wish I would have been stronger in these situations, but it’s that insecure part of me that inevitably reappears. Even when I believe my work is good, I always think it could be better. So I can be too ready to devalue it.”

Several times in her career, Streisand did not take credit for the extra work she put into her projects—decisions that were influenced by public perception of her as power hungry and by the desire to get projects done even if they ended up being attributed to someone else. After years of reflection, Streisand has come to disagree with these compromises, not because she deserves more credit than she has gotten, but because her willingness to yield has done a disservice to the women who came after her and didn’t have public examples to point to when standing up for themselves.

“In my humble opinion, there are some things I hope we can all agree upon: the antidote to lies is truth…the remedy to war is peace…and the solution to hate is love.”

Streisand is especially frightened by the way truth has been sidelined in American politics during and after the presidency of Donald Trump. This quote illustrates her own foundational values, which she hopes everyone can acknowledge are honest. Toward the end of the memoir, Streisand identifies what is most important to her in life, which is highlighted in this quote.

“I believe in the power of the truth. It’s always worked for me as an actress and a singer and a filmmaker. I’ve seen how strongly people are moved by the truth when they recognize it in a performance. There’s no place for lies in art.”

Here Streisand again equates her art with truth. As someone who wants to connect with her audience, Streisand knows that honesty comes through in art and has the power to influence people. As she makes the claim that “there’s no place for lies in art,” she also recalls all of the lies that have been spread about her and thus influenced the way her art was produced.