Rick Kot, an executive editor at Viking who oversaw production on the book, shared that, “Publishing books in two volumes is difficult just as a commercial venture. And nobody seems to have any issue with how long” Streisand’s is.
The bigness of it makes literal the career it contains. Streisand is poring over, pouring out, her life. She’s feeling her way through it, remembering, sometimes Googling as she types. It’s not a book you inhale, and it doesn’t inspire the “five takeaways” treatment. Streisand said that Christine Pittel, her editor, told her “that I had to leave some blood on the page.” So feelings are more deeply plumbed; names are named.
According to Streisand, “I was very late in delivering the book. I think I was supposed to deliver it in two years.” It took her 10. And as she went, she thought about her legacy. “If you want to read about me in 20 years or 50 years, whatever it is — if there’s still a world — these are my words. These are my thoughts.” Here is the book’s grand revelation — for a reader but for the author, too. “I didn’t know about it,” she said, of this proclivity for management, planning, vision, authority and obeying her instincts. “But writing the book, I discovered it.”
Streisand is unsparing about the treachery she faced at work, collaborating with men. Sydney Chaplin (one of Charlie’s kids) played the original Nick Arnstein during her “Funny Girl” Broadway run; they shared a flirtation that Chaplin wanted to consummate and that Streisand wanted to keep professional. Throughout her career, she’s up against what one surly camera operator, on the set of “The Prince of Tides,” boasts is a boys’ club.
That’s the sort of blood that gives this book its power — not the prospect of a bluntly louche Brando and a doting Pierre Trudeau being honest-to-God soul mates, or whatever her byzantine thing with Jon Peters was about. It’s that Barbra Streisand endured a parade of harsh workplaces yet never stopped trying to make the best work. That experience with Chaplin left her with lifelong stage fright. But what if it also helped sharpen her volition to get things — in the studio, on a film set, before a show — exactly, possibly obsessively, right?