Drew Barrymore’s own characterizations of her mother have varied across the years. In her early memoir Little Girl Lost, written in the raw aftermath of everything that had happened, her descriptions are relatively unsparing. In later years she has been more complex, acknowledging love and damage as coexisting rather than canceling each other out. In a 2021 interview she said: “My mom and I are good now.” A 2022 People interview included her observation that she could not turn her back on the person who gave her life.
What is not disputed is the timeline.
Drew Barrymore has said in various public contexts that she had her first taste of alcohol at approximately seven years old — Baileys on ice cream, as she described it in Wildflower. By eight she was what she has characterized as a “party girl.” By nine she was attending Studio 54. By the time she was ten or eleven, she was, by her own account, an alcoholic in any meaningful sense of the term — physically dependent on alcohol, psychologically oriented around its presence.
Drugs followed. By twelve, Drew Barrymore was deeply involved with substances that went well beyond alcohol.
The speed of this progression is startling even in retrospect, and it becomes more startling when you understand that it was not happening in a vacuum. A child who is regularly taken to adult nightclubs by her parent, who has grown up in an industry that treats her as a professional adult and relates to her on those terms, who has absorbed the patterns of the most famous members of her family — in which substance use and artistic achievement were threaded together — is not making choices from a baseline of typical childhood. She is making choices, to whatever extent a child can be said to be making choices, from within an environment that has systematically narrowed the options available to her.