Jason Gould Reveals Surprising Thing He Learned About Mom Barbra Streisand in Her Memoir: 'It Was Very Honest' (Exclusive)

"It had been painful [and] a little hard to read, but it didn't bother me. It didn't trigger me, really. You know? We all have trauma," Gould tells PEOPLE

Jason Gould is still learning new things about his mom, Barbra Streisand.

The singer-songwriter, 57, tells PEOPLE he read his mom's November 2023 memoir, My Name Is Barbra, and said it taught him at least one unknown fact about her childhood.

"It was interesting because I didn't know that she was a little shoplifter as a kid," he says. "I can't remember what she said [in detail] but I didn't know that about her."

Streisand's memoir touches on all the highs and lows of her life, including her divorce from Gould's father, Elliott.

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Most of the book, however, wasn't a surprise, he says, noting that he read "every darn page of it."

"I thought it was very honest, and I thought it was well-written. It had painful [parts] that were a little hard to read. We all have trauma. That's the thing. Including me," he says. "And the question is, 'How do we heal it?' So, I'm definitely on that path."

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"My mother lost her father, when she was an infant, so that's a huge trauma," he explains. "She had a stepfather, who was abusive. That's a huge trauma. My father's mother had tremendous trauma. How could that not affect him and, therefore, affect me? How could my mother's trauma not, therefore, affect me? It has, even in ways that I'm sure they're not even conscious of."

Gould, who recently released his Sacred Days EP, also recalls how his mom, 81, shared her love of music from early on.

"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 says. "And I never even attempted to write lyrics until maybe a little over 10 years ago, but it's always been a part of me."

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Still, he notes, music was a "part of me that I was afraid to explore because my mother was an icon in that world."

"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," says Gould.

"I had to work through some fear to be able to do it," he says. "I sort of reclaimed my voice."

For more from Jason Gould, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere now.

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