MY NAME IS BARBRA, by Barbra Streisand. Read by the author.
Barbra Streisand’s memoir, “My Name Is Barbra,” exists as a doorstop printed volume and a 48-hour audiobook read by the author. The two are closely related, of course, but not quite the same. As Streisand recites the story of her life — her deprived childhood and her rise to stardom, then auteurdom, then finally lifetime-achievement-award-dom, all while beating back the haters — she ad-libs off the written text, splices sentences, audibly shakes her head at dubious decisions, and altogether places us opposite her on the sofa with a cup of coffee for a two-day kibitz.
Recounting a motorcycle ride with Robert Redford while filming “The Way We Were,” Streisand describes how being on the back of a bike, her hair streaming, was never her dream. “You get knots!” she writes in the book in a parenthetical, clearly meant to echo her fear of skiing a few paragraphs earlier: “(You could break bones!).”
But recorded Streisand blithely ignores the parallelism. “You get knots, right?” she says instead, with that indelible Brooklyn-Catskills inflection. Here and throughout, her voice is simultaneously crisp and mild, wistful and urgent, an ideal vehicle for a history of triumphs and slights both decades distant and — to her, at least — vividly present.
“You get knots, right?” could hardly be a tinier change, but many such changes, over many, many hours, smooth her annoyingly ellipsis-crowded writing into a natural, intimate spoken narrative — if always a queenly one. At the end of her account of visiting Amsterdam to see the Rembrandt paintings whose antiqued brownish-red conjured the atmosphere she wanted for “Yentl,” she declares, “The only pure red I like is the color of Ruby Glow azaleas.”
