He was also, by Drew Barrymore’s own account in her 1991 memoir Little Girl Lost, written when she was sixteen, an abusive and frightening figure. She described a childhood in which her father’s visits were occasions for anxiety rather than comfort. He left when she was approximately six months old. They would have little meaningful contact for most of the following decades. She would eventually make peace with him in his final years, moving him closer to where she lived and paying his medical bills before his death from cancer in 2004. But the reconciliation, when it came, was made possible only by distance and time — and by Drew’s own willingness, as an adult with resources and a degree of emotional maturity she had spent years building, to extend grace to someone who had offered her very little.
Her mother, Ildiko Jaid Barrymore, brought her own complicated history to the family. Jaid was born in a displaced persons camp in Brannenburg, West Germany, to Hungarian refugees who had survived the Second World War. Her origins spoke of displacement and survival, of lives rebuilt in unfamiliar countries, of the particular resilience — and the particular unresolved wounds — that refugee experience tends to produce across generations. She came to America, built a life, and became an actress, though without the profile or the opportunities her daughter would eventually acquire. She and John Drew Barrymore married, had Drew, and divorced in 1984.
The divorce was not the beginning of the family’s instability. It was, in some ways, the formalization of an instability that had always been present.