I'm not exactly a Streisand fan, but I don't dislike her, either. I much prefer her as a singer. For my money, her best acting was in What's Up Doc in which she pulls off the feat of making the frantic screwball heroine likable—something Katherine Hepburn couldn't do in Bringing Up Baby, the model for What's Up Doc. This book took Streisand ten years to finish; at over 900 pages, it's an exhausting read, and was undoubtedly exhausting to produce. Much of it is fun to read, with some juicy tidbits about her co-workers. But for me, the biggest problem is that her overall point seems to be to rebut her reputation for being controlling, demanding, and egotistical. At this, she largely fails. Even as she insists she is not those things, many of her anecdotes show her to be exactly those things.
I will grant her this: her reputation has been made worse because she's a woman. As a director, Stanley Kubrick was certainly as demanding and controlling as Streisand, but rarely called out for being a pain in the neck like she has been. (Of course, she has not, to my mind, directed a movie as great as Dr. Strangelove or 2001 or Clockwork Orange or even his lesser films like Barry Lyndon or The Shining.) Her controlling attitude as as actor, singer and director (an attitude she has had since her first stage appearance in 1961) has hurt her reputation in ways that wouldn't have hurt a male artist. Still, she shows in this book that she is, indeed, demanding and controlling, sometimes in fairly petty ways. I'm not sure she's aware of how badly she comes off sometimes, though it is brave of her not to sugarcoat her behavior, beginning with her very first Broadway role right up to her latest concert tour. As a singer, she is spectacular. As an actor, she is fine. I can't judge her as a director, because Yentl is the only film she's directed that I've seen and I wasn't terribly impressed with that (though she did take on lots of directorial chores in A Star is Born which I liked). Still, despite wild overusage of phrases like "Point is" and "Needless to say," for a 900 page book, this is a breezy read and feels like it gives a fairly honest idea of what she is like, for better or worse.
