There is something both touching and quietly devastating about this detail. A fourteen-year-old girl, recently released from a psychiatric facility, legally independent from her parents, living in a rundown Los Angeles apartment, found a version of reliable adult care in the home of a rock musician she knew tangentially. The care she received there was genuine. It was also not the care that a family structure should have provided and hadn’t.
Two films featuring Drew Barrymore appeared in 1989 — See You in the Morning and Far from Home — though she was not actively pursuing her career during the period immediately following her emancipation. The years from approximately 1987 through 1991 were, professionally speaking, a period of relative quiet. She was not, as some accounts have incorrectly suggested, permanently blacklisted from Hollywood or subject to a formal industry embargo. But she was also not actively working in the way she had been during the early 1980s.
The reasons were multiple and interrelated. Her “wild child” reputation — the tabloid image of the troubled teenager, the photographs and the public incidents — created a perception problem that directors and producers of the era had to contend with. Whether someone would show up for work reliably was a practical consideration that her recent history complicated. And Drew herself was not, during this period, primarily focused on her career. She was focused on surviving and figuring out how to be a functional human being in the world.
She was a teenager.
This is perhaps the simplest and most important thing to keep in mind when considering Drew Barrymore’s emancipation: she was a teenager trying to figure out her life. The legal instrument of emancipation had given her formal independence. It had not given her the emotional foundations, the practical knowledge, or the support network that she actually needed. Those things she would have to build, slowly and imperfectly, over the following years — through her own choices, her own mistakes, and whatever wisdom she could accumulate from the people around her.