Lea Michele Jokes She Has ‘265 Days to Learn to Read’ Before Barbra Streisand’s Memoir Comes Out

8 February, 2023

You gotta admit, Lea Michele is a funny girl. Following the announcement that her idol Barbra Streisand is publishing her long-awaited memoir this fall, the 36-year-old Glee star posted a hilarious TikTok sharing her excitement for the book while poking fun at a persistent, bizarre rumor that she’s illiterate.

“265 days to learn to read!!!!” Michele captioned the Wednesday (Feb. 8) TikTok, in which she clasps her hand to her face excitedly in front of a screenshot of Streisand’s book announcement.

The memoir, titled My Name is Barbra, is set to arrive on Nov. 7 after being in the works for years. It was originally scheduled to be released in 2017, but Streisand hadn’t finished writing about her life, career, relationships with Marlon Brando and James Brolin and activism in time, and its release was delayed until now.

Michele is currently playing Fanny Brice, the character originated by Streisand onstage and in film, in the Broadway revival of Funny Girl. Since she took over the role from Beanie Feldstein last year, a strange conspiracy theory that dates back to 2018 has been recirculating on the internet, speculating that the Scream Queens alum isn’t able to read or write and that she learns all her lines for acting projects by ear.

She’s previously made jokes about the rumors, and even addressed them head-on in a New York Times profile back in September. “I went to Glee every single day; I knew my lines every single day,” Michele told the publication. “And then there’s a rumor online that I can’t read or write? It’s sad. It really is. I think often if I were a man, a lot of this wouldn’t be the case.”

Meanwhile, Babs has been very supportive of Michele during her tenure as Fanny, and even left her a sweet message to open backstage at one of her shows. “She wrote me this beautiful letter,” Michele shared on Late Night with Seth Meyers. “She was like, ‘It’s really wonderful when your dreams come true, isn’t it?’ And I just, like, fell to my knees and I called Ryan Murphy, my mom, Jonathan Groff and Michael Mayer.”

See Lea Michele joke about those illiteracy rumors in her new TikTok about Barbra Streisand’s memoir below.