Book Review: ‘My Name is Barbra,’ by Barbra Streisand

MY NAME IS BARBRA, by Barbra Streisand

Hello, enormous.

Of course Barbra Streisand’s memoir, 10 years in the making if you don’t count the chapter she scribbled in longhand in the 1990s and then lost, was going to approach “Power Broker” proportions.

For one thing, she is — fits of insecurity notwithstanding — a bona fide power broker: tearing down barriers to and between Broadway, Hollywood, the recording industry and Washington, D.C., like Robert Moses on a demolition bender.

For another, as Streisand writes in “My Name Is Barbra,” a 970-page victory lap past all who ever doubted, diminished or dissed her, with lingering high fives for the many supporters, she does tend to agonize over the editing process.

After adding back material to her version of “A Star Is Born” for Netflix in 2018 — “I think I made it better. But did I? I’m never quite sure”— she fantasized about new, fuller cuts of both “Funny Girl,” which made her a movie star on arrival, and “Yentl,” her debut as director. Planning her wedding to the actor James Brolin in 1998, she tried to winnow down a long list of desserts before deciding “We’ll just have them all … why not?”