Wildflower, written and published in her early forties, is a different kind of work. It is episodic rather than chronological — a collection of linked memories and reflections rather than a linear autobiography — and it reads as the work of someone who has thought about her life over a long period and has developed genuine views about what it means. The emancipation story is in there, but so are dozens of other fragments: travels, relationships, professional experiences, encounters with strangers that lodged themselves in her memory for reasons she tries to articulate.
The book received genuinely positive reviews — not the polite reviews that celebrity memoirs often receive, in which critics grade on a curve and respond primarily to the celebrity’s willingness to be candid, but reviews that engaged with the writing as writing. This is unusual enough in the celebrity memoir genre to be noteworthy. It suggests that whatever else is true of Drew Barrymore’s public image, she has genuine facility with language and a genuine capacity to find and articulate meaning in her own experience.
Rebel Homemaker (2021) represented a different project: an exploration of domestic life, cooking, and the specific pleasures and challenges of making a home. The book’s premise — that domesticity is not a retreat from a meaningful life but an active and engaged expression of one — reflects something characteristic about Drew’s relationship to the ordinary details of daily existence. She is someone who takes pleasure in the texture of everyday life, who finds meaning in the act of making things comfortable and beautiful and functional. This is not surprising in someone whose childhood was conspicuously lacking in those qualities; the desire to build what you didn’t have tends to be specific and conscious.