That choice is not a guarantee that the pattern will not reassert itself in subsequent generations. Family histories are not simply reversed by a single generation’s determination. But it is a real choice, made by a real person, with real consequences that are visible in the life she has built and the children she is raising.
The greatest artists in her family were often destroyed by the same forces that made them great — the sensitivity, the capacity for intensity, the willingness to go to emotional extremes that performance requires, turned inward and made toxic by alcohol and other substances. Drew Barrymore has not primarily been her family’s greatest artist. She has been, perhaps more valuably, its first conscious attempt to be its own historian — to look at what happened across the generations, to understand it, and to try to break the chain.
Whether she has fully succeeded is not a question anyone can answer with confidence. The chain she inherited was long and strong. The effort she has made to weaken it has been genuine and sustained. The evidence available suggests that her daughters’ childhoods are meaningfully different from her own, and that that difference is the result of her specific choices and commitments.
That is not nothing. In the context of the Barrymore legacy, it may be the most significant achievement the family has produced.
## The Specific Weight of the Barrymore Name in the 1980s
Drew Barrymore did not arrive in Hollywood as a child without a context. She arrived as the heir to one of the most famous theatrical dynasties in American history, at a moment when that dynasty’s reputation was somewhat complicated by the various high-profile self-destructions it had produced. The name Barrymore, in the entertainment industry of the early 1980s, carried enormous historical prestige and a fair amount of recent cautionary weight.