## On Paper and in Practice: The Gap Between Legal Freedom and Actual Life
The Los Angeles apartment that Drew Barrymore moved into after her emancipation was, by her own description, not a promising setting for a fresh start. It was rundown. It was hers. It was also, in the most immediate practical terms, a space in which she was confronted with the full weight of the self-sufficiency she had been granted.
She has talked, with characteristic self-deprecating humor, about the gap between the idea of independence and the reality of it. She did not know how to do laundry, or did it badly. She worked at a café and was not, she has acknowledged, particularly competent at the job. She was a fourteen-year-old girl who had been given, via a court order, the legal standing to manage her own affairs — and who was discovering that legal standing and practical competence were not the same thing.
The stay with David Crosby and his wife Jan Dance emerged from this period. Crosby — a founding member of the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young collective, himself a person who had navigated considerable substance-related difficulties and arrived on the other side of them — and his wife offered Drew a few months of what she has described as something genuinely different from anything she had experienced: a household organized around sobriety, routine, and mutual support. Crosby has spoken publicly about why he and his wife took her in, noting that she needed to be around people who were committed to sober living — people who could model, in concrete daily practice, what that actually looked like.