“My Name Is Barbra,” Excerpted

With her long-awaited memoir, Barbra Streisand offers a funny and frank look at her career, six decades in. At a whopping 992 pages, it appears that the Hollywood and Broadway legend . . . isn’t skimping on the details of her rarefied life.

—Time.

PAGE 1 — Barbra chalks up her cardiovascular wellness to screaming daily at C-SPAN.

PAGE 5 — Barbra recounts girls’ weekend with Donna Karan full of laughter, nail care.

PAGE 14 — Barbra says that Track II diplomacy is the “Hello, gorgeous” of statecraft.

PAGE 20 — Barbra recounts anecdote featuring Shimon Peres, throw pillows.

PAGE 112 — Barbra says Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello is “an autobiographical masterpiece but the drawer pulls are all wrong.”

PAGE 261 — Barbra says that too much guitar noodling on a song can sound like jazzturbation.

PAGE 290 — Barbra says that being the only artist to have No. 1 albums in each of the past six decades always makes people ask her if she wants to lie down after lunch.

PAGE 292 — Barbra interlards her praise for Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a woman?” speech with a digression on period-appropriate sconcing.

PAGE 293 — Barbra says calling up Apple’s Tim Cook to have Siri’s pronunciation of “Streisand” corrected was her “Norma Rae” moment.

PAGE 384 — Barbra says of her collection of Cartier and Cheuret antique clocks, “They are all my children.”

PAGE 477 — Barbra says she included on her archival album the forty-nine seconds of applause for her at the 1969 Oscars for “context.”

PAGE 578 — Barbra writes that starring in “Nuts” resulted in speaking requests from Planters and Blue Diamond.

PAGE 649 — Barbra writes that she cloned her dog Sammie because her other dogs pooped on her antique-doll collection.

PAGE 702 — Barbra says that many Republicans attend her concerts “because they’re who can afford the tickets.”

PAGE 803 — Barbra writes that a carefully selected array of Jordan almonds on a Lalique platter is as close as man gets to God. “Have I ever suffered for my commitment to perfectionism? Of course. But shouldn’t we be willing to suffer for the things we love? It’s like the time at a fund-raiser in the nineteen-eighties—oh, my God, I’m losing my breath control even thinking about this—I got seated next to the real-estate magnate Donald Trump. Talk about suffering. The eleventh plague. Even then, I knew. I knew. But I kept my mouth shut until dessert. Because we all have to practice empathy. Life is not always easy. You want a walk along the ocean at sunset? Order the mussels. If you’re not a listener, then you can’t get informed, and Jefferson said that ‘a well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to democracy.’ Or look at the Hebrew word dayenu, which means ‘enough.’ No one mandates what is and isn’t dayenu; there’s no Dayenu Committee (though if you’re looking for people to serve: hello). You’ve got to determine this stuff on your own—when to speak out, when to rejoice in song. You know, some of my friends tease me for color-coördinating the wrappers on the candy in my living rooms; other people thought I was crazy when I built a ‘shopping mall’ of antique stores and my used costumes, based on the one at the Winterthur estate, in the basement of my barn in Malibu. But at the end of the day? These are precisely the things that these same people love about me. Bill and Hillary adored it when I gave them a tour of the barn and I made Hillary try on my sequinny black see-through Scaasi pants suit from the ’69 Oscars: NSFW Hillary. Hillary beyond e-mails. I mean, if you don’t assert your will and your consummate design sense, who are you really? Sure, people have called me ‘mouthy’ or ‘pushy’ or a million things that they’d never say about a man, but you know what? The world needs to know what the rest of the world is thinking. People who need people, etc. And in my experience people want to be told if their jeans make their ass look fat. Sure, they’ll smart at first, but later that night, as they’re falling asleep? They’re smiling. Why? Because they’re thinking, Barbra cares about my silhouette. So, sometimes you need to speak out. Sometimes you need to look at the person next to you at the dinner party of life and—on realizing that he is a liar and a bully and a misogynist and a tax cheat who supports capital punishment—whisper in his ear, ‘Donald, honey. Less is more.’ ”

PAGE 945 — Barbra recounts vacation with Madeleine Albright rife with handbag repair, disappointment.

PAGE 963 — Barbra concludes lengthy section on global disarmament with “Yentl” ’s tagline, “Nothing’s impossible.”

PAGE 970 — Barbra designs own headstone, which reads “Dayenu already.”

PAGE 992 — Barbra says the two greatest threats to civilization are encroachments on the truth and the stickers on fruit. ♦