Part of what drives that resistance, one suspects, is Drew’s own understanding of family patterns and their generational transmission. Jaid was also shaped by circumstances she did not choose. The Hungarian refugees who survived the Second World War and had to rebuild their lives in displaced persons camps were not provided with ideal conditions for raising psychologically secure children. The instabilities that showed up in Jaid’s parenting did not originate with Jaid. They moved through generations, as these things do, expressing themselves differently in each generation but maintaining their fundamental character.
Drew Barrymore is, among other things, someone who has thought about this. She has not simply lived through a difficult childhood. She has tried to understand it, and that understanding includes the recognition that her mother was also, in some sense, the product of what was done to her. This does not absolve Jaid. It contextualizes her.
What Drew has tried to do — and what her public behavior as a parent suggests she has largely managed — is to interrupt the transmission. To be the generation in which the pattern begins to change. That is genuinely hard work, and it is the kind of work that tends not to generate much public recognition, because its results are visible primarily in what doesn’t happen: in the absence of the instability and harm that marked her own childhood.
## The Professional Persona and the Human Being Underneath It
The Drew Barrymore who appears on television every day is a recognizable and consistent creation: warm, curious, enthusiastic, prone to emotional responses that feel genuine rather than performed, interested in the people she talks to in ways that come across as actual interest rather than the simulated variety. This persona has been commercially successful precisely because it doesn’t feel like a persona.