## Conclusion: Independence, In Practice
What does it mean to become legally independent from your parents at fourteen?
In Drew Barrymore’s case, it meant moving into an apartment and learning to do her own laundry. It meant working at a café she wasn’t good at. It meant spending three months with a musician and his wife, learning what a sober household actually looked like. It meant, eventually, going back to work in an industry that had formed complicated impressions of her, and working deliberately and patiently to change those impressions not through publicity management but through the quality of the work itself.
It meant founding a production company that gave her structural control over her own professional life. It meant writing honestly about her childhood and her adolescence, first when she was barely old enough to have full perspective and then again, more fully, when she was old enough to understand it more completely. It meant navigating relationships — with her mother, with her father in his final years, with the people she married and separated from, with the daughters she is raising — with the awareness that she is doing so without the model of what a functional family looked like, having to build that understanding from scratch.
It meant becoming a person, in the fullest sense — not the person the entertainment industry had decided she was, not the person the tabloids had narrated, not simply the heir to a theatrical dynasty or the cautionary tale or the comeback story. A person, with a history she understands and a present she has built and a future she is still making.