What she built from that material is, on its own terms, remarkable. Flower Films has produced commercially successful films for three decades and continues to operate. Her talk show has reached daily audiences for multiple years. Her business ventures span cosmetics, wine, homeware, fashion, and publishing. She has written four books. She has won a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award and been nominated for an Emmy. She has raised two daughters.
None of that, by itself, constitutes evidence of having figured out who you are. Some people accumulate those accomplishments while remaining profoundly confused about themselves. What the larger picture of Drew Barrymore’s life suggests is something more substantive: that she has done the actual work of self-understanding, in ways that are not always visible but that show up in the choices she makes and the ways she speaks about her own history.
She carries the Barrymore name differently than the people who carried it before her. She does not seem burdened by the legacy’s grandeur or crushed by its tragedy. She has made it into something that belongs to her rather than something she belongs to.
That, perhaps, is the thing the emancipation was actually for — not the legal independence, but the longer project of becoming an independent person. The court order was one step. The work that followed was many more.
In a courthouse in California in 1989, a judge asked a fourteen-year-old girl whether she was ready for a future that could not be reversed. She said yes. She has been answering that question, in different ways and different contexts, ever since.