A kinder reflection
Drew Barrymore says Wildflower isn’t really a memoir. She’s right. It’s more a gently tangled garden of stories from her life, heavy on the flower imagery, light on the dirt.
If you’re looking for scandal, you won’t find it here. Her addictions, wild ways and emancipation at age14 from her mother have already been well covered in the tabloids and in her first book, Little Girl Lost.
What you will find in this new book is a contentedly married mother of two, all grown up at 40 and full of gratitude and forgiveness.
There are fun anecdotes of adrenalin highs, including her impromptu leap off the deck of an ocean liner and her skydiving adventure with fellow Charlie’s Angel Cameron Diaz. There’s a tender account of her dying father, the deeply disturbed John Drew Barrymore, part of “the line of great loonies from which I come.” Granddaughter of legendary John Barrymore and great-niece of actors Lionel and Ethel, she adds poignantly, “They were talented, damaged, and I can’t help but idealize them because it’s all I have.”
Even her mother, who raised her with “zero protection, zero consistency,” gets a gentle treatment here.
Barrymore glosses over the lowlights. Her first two marriages are barely mentioned, her postpartum depression covered off in a single sentence. She does refer to her desktop flash-dance on David Letterman’s show and her photo spread in Playboy, after which her godfather, Steven Spielberg (who’d directed her in E.T.), ordered her to “Cover up.”
Wildflower alternates between selfeffacing candour (“I was an idiot”) and snippets of neo-hippie philosophy (“Let us all be wildflowers!”). While her writing lacks elegance and won’t win her many new followers, it’s warm and chatty and has enough self-deprecating touches to endear her further to her legions of fans. Journalist Marcia Kaye ( marciakaye.com) is a frequent contributor to these pages.