What was Barbra Streisand’s autobiography doing in ‘The White Lotus’?

Babs’ 992-page memoir speaks volumes about the character reading it.

On ‘The White Lotus,’ Jaclyn, an aging starlet, brings Barbra Streisand’s memoir to the pool. Image by screenshot/HBO

By Louis Keene March 25, 2025

The following contains spoilers for Season 3 of The White Lotus.

You would probably not, all things considered, bring the hardcover Barbra Streisand autobiography with you on vacation. That is because it is extraordinarily long, and heavy. Coming in at a Tolstoy-esque 992 pages and 2.3 pounds, My Name Is Barbra is hardly a beach read. If you do somehow fit it in your carry-on, you will soon be asking yourself why you tried.

So when a character in HBO’s The White Lotus brandishes Babs’ book at the pool, it reminds us, first and foremost, that the wealthy are as prone to bad decisions as everyone else. But why not take a closer look at the book-character pairing?

After all, the show has always been intentional about its literary product placement. In Season 1, set in Hawaii, a snobby college sophomore leafs through Franz Fanon’s anticolonial manifesto, then helps an island native rob the rich. On the coast of Italy in Season 2, a sex-starved wife peruses Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli — a novel about, among other things, a marriage in free-fall.

The third season takes us to Thailand, where Jaclyn, a celebrity actress in the twilight of her prime (played by Michelle Monaghan), has dragged her high school-era besties Laurie and Kate to the show’s eponymous hotel to rekindle their friendship. Like any trio traveling together in their 40s, they have long-simmering mutual resentments, which emerge almost immediately in searing rounds of weapons-grade lashon hara.

Of the three moms, only Laurie (Carrie Coon) is single, and Jaclyn — when she isn’t bragging about her husband’s insatiable sexual appetite — prods her to sleep with the young, hot masseuse who works at the resort. But a few nights later, Jaclyn is the one who brings the masseuse back to her room. Kate finds out and spills to Laurie, and when the three are at the pool the next day — and Jaclyn’s nose is in the Streisand — it all comes out.

Portability concerns aside, the book suits Jaclyn, whose poorly concealed self-consciousness about her fading youth manifests throughout the season not only for the audience, but also for her friends. She touts her sex life, flees at the sight of old people, preens before younger women at a nightclub and, finally, has the affair. My Name Is Barbra, then, is a book that never ends about a career that never ended — and on a deeper level, a vitality that never dimmed.

When approached about writing a memoir in the 1980s, Streisand — then around the age that Jaclyn is in the show — declined because she believed she was too young. That story appears in the book that came out 40 years later. Alas, Jaclyn seems unlikely to get that far on this trip. With only two more episodes left in the season, she appears to be stuck on the first few pages.

Louis Keene is a reporter for the Forward. His work has also been published in The New York Times, New York magazine and Vice. He is based in Los Angeles.

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