Irony Is Officially Dead

You may have heard of the “Streisand Effect,” which Wikipedia describes as “an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead backfires by increasing public awareness of the information. The effect is named for American singer and actress Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress a photographer’s publication of a photograph showing her clifftop residence in Malibu, California, taken to document coastal erosion in California, inadvertently drew far greater attention to the previously obscure photograph.”

Well, it seems the aging crooner and political savant (she reads The Economist and writes letters to the editor of the Los Angeles Times!) is not so concerned about her privacy any more, and has just published a 970-page autobiography, My Name Is Barbra. And yet, to go by the subtle but deliciously snarky review in the New York Review of Books, it is possible Streisand had something even longer in mind. Quoth the reviewer (critic and novelist Daphne Merkin):

The memoir she finally came up with is peppered liberally with ellipses, suggesting that its author might have had even more to impart if she hadn’t exercised a modicum of restraint. Indeed, it’s easy to laugh it off as an exercise in undiluted narcissism, driven by a vaulting ego. What’s the point, one might ask, of so much elaborately detailed selfhood spilling all over the place, even if Streisand is a celebrity—a phenomenon of sorts? There is something parodic about the scope of the enterprise, as if its author had lost sight of her own significance—or, rather, her relative insignificance in the scheme of things: she quotes Goethe out of the blue and invokes Alan Watts’s Spirit of Zen and recounts instructing Bill Clinton on how to savage an opponent in a debate.

A reader can do little but gawk at the magnitude of it all. . .

This droll review contains lots of deadly stiletto thrusts at Streisand’s pretensions and . . . all around weirdness.

The prepublication hullabaloo that surrounded the appearance of My Name Is Barbra was predictable, beginning months ahead of time with rumors of an eight-figure advance and sotto voce discussions of whether the book was ghostwritten. To my mind the biggest faux pas of the entire venture—and there is no denying that parts of the book are very absorbing—is the discernible lack of an authoritative editor, or perhaps Streisand’s disinclination to listen to an editor’s advice. It seems that her instincts have been allowed to prevail to the point where other people’s opinions don’t count, even when they should. She announces, “I never really felt intimidated by anyone.” It’s both her strength, one might argue, and her Achilles’ heel.

There does not seem to be a single piece of praise or adulation that Streisand fails to quote, whether it’s from her early days as a performer or later in life. . .

Every outfit and pair of shoes she wore over six decades is meticulously chronicled. Either she has a memory to rival that of Stalin, who is said to have been able to recall every detail of the enormous number of books he read, or she kept a continuing record, assuming prospective readers would want to know about the 1930s honey-colored lamb coat with an embroidered lining of flowers she bought for ten dollars at a thrift shop and wore to the audition for I Can Get It for You Wholesale. . .

Somewhere during my infinitely time-consuming reading (the audio version, read by Streisand herself, runs to forty-eight hours and seventeen minutes), I was reminded of the moment at the 1985 Oscars when Sally Field shouted, “I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!” when she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in Places in the Heart. In Field’s case one felt a real vulnerability, her sudden sense of her own sway over the audience; in Streisand’s the embarrassing pileup of tributes seems more like a verification of her popularity, just in case we have failed to take in the extent of her celebrity. . .

I’m guessing the NYRB is going to get a letter. They’re not supposed to treat the correctly-opinioned celebrities this way—especially the ones who guard their privacy so thoroughly.

One thing I am glad I learned is that Streisand cloned her dog.

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