| If a person’s speaking voice—to say nothing of her singing voice—reveals anything about her writing style, it’s no wonder that Barbra Streisand’s new memoir, “My Name Is Barbra,” stretches to nearly a thousand pages. In 1962, the New Yorker writer Geoffrey T. Hellman met the future superstar shortly after her Broadway début, and discovered that she had a lot to say. The resulting vignette, published in The Talk of the Town, distills a voice that is extremely big onstage and remarkably voluble off it. Streisand, then starring in “I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” had just turned twenty, and she seems to have related, in a nearly uninterrupted monologue, her thoughts on everything from her living quarters to her reliance on late-night Chinese food, plus opinions on jewelry, existential musings (“What does it matter where you are born?”), and reasons for shopping at thrift stores. The interview itself becomes something like a memoir, establishing details that Streisand, more than sixty years later, continues to share. Her Brooklyn roots and comic timing are proudly on display, as is her famous ambition. What did the young entertainer predict for her future? “I suppose I’m going to be famous,” she said. | 
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