In another sense, the public narrative of Drew Barrymore has always told a highly partial and curated version of what was actually happening. The tabloid story of the wild child in the 1980s was real but incomplete. The comeback narrative of the late 1990s was real but incomplete. The America’s sweetheart version of the 2000s was real but incomplete. The talk-show host who turns her warmth on guests every day is real, and also incomplete.
What her memoirs, and her more candid interviews, and the public record assembled over decades, suggest is a person of considerable complexity who has done substantial work in relation to her own history. She is funny and warm and genuinely interested in people — those qualities are real, not manufactured. She is also a person who carries the weight of a childhood that was significantly not okay, who has had to do the kind of work that most people who experience something similar do not discuss publicly, and who has found ways to live with the full weight of her history without being defined entirely by it.
The Barrymore family name is one of the most famous in American theatrical history. It has attached to genius and to self-destruction, to achievement and to waste, across more than a century. Drew Barrymore is the member of that family who has done the most to understand what she inherited and to choose, deliberately and repeatedly, what she wants to pass forward.
She chose to have children. She has been, by all available evidence, a present and engaged mother. She has described her parenting as informed by what she didn’t have — the stability, the routine, the reliable adult presence — and as motivated by the determination to give her daughters something different. Whatever else is true of her, the choices she has made in relation to the next generation suggest a person who has genuinely grappled with the family script and tried to write a different one.