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‘I Thought It Was Very Honest’: Jason Gould Reacts To Mom Barbra Streisand’s Memoir
Jason Gould reveals that he continues to discover new details about his mother, Barbra Streisand every day.
In November 2023, the 57-year-old singer-songwriter told PEOPLE that he had read his mother’s memoir, My Name Is Barbra, and that it had revealed to him at least one little-known detail about her early years. “It was interesting because I didn’t know that she was a little shoplifter as a kid,” he recalls.
Jason Gould talks about his mother’s memoir
“I can’t remember what she said [in detail], but I didn’t know that about her,” says Streisand’s son Jason Gould about her new memoir. The memoir by Streisand discusses all the highs and lows of her life, including her split from Elliott Gould, the father of Jason. Nevertheless, he claims that not much of the book surprised him, having read “every darn page of it.”
“It was wonderfully written and, in my opinion, really honest. There were some uncomfortable and somewhat difficult parts to read. Everybody has experienced trauma. That’s the issue, even myself,” he said. “And ‘How can we heal it?’ is the question. I’m on that route, for sure.”
“My mother lost her father when she was an infant, so that’s a huge trauma,” he says. “She lived with an abusive stepfather. That is a serious trauma. The mother of my father experienced severe trauma. How could that not impact him and thus impact me? So, how could I not be affected by my mother’s trauma? It has, even in ways that I doubt they even realize.” Gould, who just put out his Sacred Days EP, also remembers how his eighty-one-year-old mother instilled in her a lifelong love of music. “As a child, I was always a kid who would sit at the keyboard and come up with little melodies, but I never knew how to develop them into a full-fledged song,” he recalls. “And I never even attempted to write lyrics until maybe a little over ten years ago, but it’s always been a part of me.”
Nevertheless, he says that because his mother was a legend in that field, music was a “part of me that I was afraid to explore”. “It was like, I don’t want to be judged and compared to her, so I kind of dampened down that part of myself, for a long time, until I couldn’t anymore,” Gould recalls. “I had to work through some fear to be able to do it,” he claims. “I sort of reclaimed my voice.” The son of Barbra Streisand, Elliott Gould, the 85-year-old actor, was once a quiet child, but Gould has gone a long way from then.
Jason Gould’s musical artist’s journey
“I was kind of a repressed kid; a lot of us shy folks go into the arts to express ourselves,” he recalls. “I used to sit at the keyboard all the time as a kid and make small melodies, but I never knew how to turn them into a finished song. I would have musical fragments. It’s always been a part of me, even though I never really tried writing lyrics until maybe a little over ten years ago.”
“My mother was recording music when I was in her belly,” he continues. “The vibration of music is so powerful.” Gould’s mother didn’t discover he could sing until she heard him through the bedroom door when he was fifteen years old. “It was part of me that I was afraid to explore because my mother was an icon in that world,” he says. “It was like, ‘I don’t want to be compared to her,’ so I dampened down that part of myself for a long time.”
Gould’s early exposure to the entertainment industry came via his part in his mother’s 1972 film Up the Sandbox. Before making his one-time appearance on The Bronx Zoo in 1988, he took a sabbatical from filming. In Say Anything the following year, he played the hard-partying Mike Cameron, whose keys John Cusack had to conceal.
Following his costarring role with his mother in 1991’s The Prince of Tides, he took on fewer roles in the following years and eventually ceased acting altogether. In the 1980s, Gould came out as gay to his parents. But in 1991, a fake tale that he had married someone else was published in a tabloid. “It was just so grotesque to me that they could make up a story like that and claim they had seen pictures of my wedding to a man,” Gould told SFGate afterward. “And then print this story even though I deny it.”
After singing with Streisand, he realized he wanted to “work through” that aspect of himself. “To be able to express that part of myself was my goal, really,” he stated. Streisand lauded the voice of her son in a 2014 interview with PEOPLE. “When he was 15, I heard him through the door, and I brought up that the humming was such a beautiful sound,” she said.
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