We’re hours away from Barbra Streisand‘s memoir, My Name is Barbra, and stories are starting to emerge from the long-anticipated tome. In a new interview with the BBC, Streisand recounted one of the many tales she tells in the 992-page book — and it’s an impressive flex.
In the book, Streisand admitted to some hilarious diva-like behavior, including the time she called up Apple CEO Tim Cook to complain about the way Siri was pronouncing her name.
“My name isn’t spelled with a ‘Z,’” she said. “It’s Strei-sand, like sand on the beach. How simple can you get?” Thankfully, Cook was willing to entertain her concerns. “Tim Cook was so lovely,” Streisand confirmed. “He had Siri change the pronunciation.” She added, “I guess that’s one perk of fame!”
Elsewhere, Streisand admitted that her life hasn’t been as breezy as it might seem from the outside. “I want to live life,” she said. “I want to get in my husband’s truck and just wander, hopefully with the children somewhere near us. Life is fun for me when they come over. They love playing with the dogs and we have fun. I haven’t had much fun in my life, to tell you the truth. And I want to have more fun.”
She told the BBC that she wrote her book in an attempt to correct the record about herself. “It was the only way to have some control over my life,” she said. “This is my legacy. I wrote my story. I don’t have to do any more interviews after this.”
My Name is Barbra, out Nov. 7 via Viking, sees Streisand recounting the totality of her life and career, “from growing up in Brooklyn to her first star-making appearances in New York nightclubs to her breakout performance in Funny Girl (musical and film) to the long string of successes in every medium in the years that followed.”
There’s a bit of a fabled aura around Streisand’s memoir, which she’s essentially been working on for decades. As she explained in a 2021 Tonight Show interview, it was former First Lady Jackie Kennedy who first approached her about writing a book in the mid-Eighties (Kennedy was working as an editor at Doubleday at the time). Streisand said she wasn’t ready to write then, but around 1999, she started reflecting on her life and career in her journals, though that effort eventually got sidetracked by other endeavors.
Streisand picked up her pen again in 2008 and did, in fact, publish a book — though it was 2010’s My Passion for Design, which was less memoir and more about Streisand’s love of, well, interior design and architecture. The next big update came in 2015 when Viking officially announced that it had acquired the rights to Streisand’s memoir and that the book would hit shelves in 2017. That date, however, obviously came and went.
In that interview with Fallon last year, Streisand said the pandemic finally gave her the time to finish the book. “I’ve written 824 pages, and I still have the little epilogue to do,” she quipped.
