"My Name is Barbra," Excerpted

With her long-awaited memoir, Barbra Streisand offers a funny and frank look at her career, six decades in

- By Henry Alford

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”