NEW YORK • Before she’s ready to talk about her memoir, Barbra Streisand needs to pull herself away from current events.

“I’m watching (expelled Rep.) George Santos, and worrying about the world and democracy,” she says at the start of a telephone interview, when asked how’s she doing.

“I have to say,” she adds a moment later, “I guess I’m OK.”

There are reasons “My Name is Barbra” took as long to wrap up as even her most challenging film projects. For decades, she rarely had the kind of solitary time needed to settle down and write. And even with her film and concert career essentially over — “I don’t enjoy performing anymore,” she says — the longtime liberal and political activist remains absorbed in the news no matter how distressing, from next year’s U.S. presidential election to the war in the Middle East.

For Streisand, long one of the most private of superstars, opening up about herself is an ongoing challenge. But, as she explains in her memoir, she felt an “obligation to the people truly interested” in her work, in the process behind her work “and perhaps the person behind the process.”

“I thought writing a book would be easier than making a movie, but boy, was I wrong,” she writes.

Published in early November, “My Name is Barbra” is a nearly 1,000 page memoir that covers one of the epic narratives in modern show business — her uncompromising rise from working class Brooklyn in the 1940s and ‘50s to global fame.