The irony is that the self she is being — warm, present, interested, emotionally available — is the self she built through painful process over decades. The person on screen is the outcome of the story. The person on screen would not exist without everything that came before her, including the most difficult parts. This is not a comfortable thought, because it suggests that some of what Drew experienced was necessary to make her what she eventually became. That is probably true, and it is also not a justification for any of it.
## A Dynasty’s End and a New Beginning
The Barrymore family’s trajectory through American cultural life spans from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, and Drew Barrymore may be the member who most clearly represents a turning point in that trajectory. Not an end — the dynasty has not concluded, and the family relationships she maintains with her children and with the Kopelman family extend the story into another generation — but a change in direction.
The pattern that characterized the Barrymore legacy through most of its American history was one of talent deployed against enormous personal instability. The greatest performers the family produced were also, in many cases, the most self-destructive. John Barrymore’s genius was inseparable, in the accounts of those who knew him, from his particular relationship with alcohol and from the way that relationship eventually consumed everything else. Diana Barrymore’s autobiography, Too Much, Too Soon (1957), became a kind of cautionary text about the family’s pattern — the title itself was a diagnosis.