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Drew Barrymore’s daytime talk show turned around, rating wise. They made adjustments and Drew made some tweaks as a host that sound like it helped. As far as I can tell, that’s why she merited a huge profile in The Los Angeles Times. That and the fact that everyone is fascinated with Drew and her famously chaotically tragic family. But Drew is an absolutely open book. She tells everything, like how her alcoholic father was absent throughout her life or how her mother was ill-equipped to raise a child. Or about drinking at Studio 54 at nine years old and getting hooked on coke at 12, then being thrown in lock down rehab at 13. It’s always a lot with Drew. And when she moved to New York only to divorce Will Kopelman, her ‘a lot’ became alcohol. Her drinking was enough for her therapist to fire her and her friends to stage an intervention. Longtime friend Cameron Diaz was one of the friends that told Drew she was out of control but stood by her as she quit booze. Cameron, who has known Drew since she left rehab at 14, said that even with everything we do know, we still can’t understand how bad Drew had it as a kid.

On not being defined by her childhood: There’s a choice to be had in how you see your circumstances, and I refuse to be stifled as a human being because of what I lived through as a kid. Don’t f—ing cloak me in this dark s—. I don’t want to take on anyone else’s perception of what it should have been, because I don’t feel that way. I think that I’m incredibly rebellious because of it.

Drew can’t shake the PTSD of being forced into rehab as a teen: I will always have the ‘They’re coming, they’re coming’ mentality. It’s the one thing that, unfortunately, I can’t shake. I’m pretty sure that this will all go away at any moment, I will get locked up again, and I will lose my job.

Cameron Diaz on helping Drew getting sober: But I knew that if we all stuck with her and gave her the support she needed, she would find her way. I have absolute faith in her. You can’t even comprehend how hard it was to be her as a child, and then she shot out the other end with the ability to save herself.

Co-host Ross Mathews on Drew: You hear that a lot from our guests: What is happening? Sometimes I’ll be reading the teleprompter and she’ll just start petting my shoulder because she’s so tactile. If you say something that she loves, whether she knows you or not, she will storm through a room or TV studio and just embrace you. And if it wasn’t Drew Barrymore, you’d be like, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, do I know you?’

But because it’s her and it’s not put on, you just find yourself embracing her back. And I feel like that’s what’s happened with the viewers over the past three seasons. At first, it was like, ‘Wait, what?’ But now they’ve seen it’s the real deal, and they’ve embraced her back.

[From Los Angeles Times]

“There’s a choice to be had in how you see your circumstances,” I found this a powerful statement. There are parts of my life I rarely bring up because I choose not to be defined by them. Because Drew’s right, people do project their pity or whatever on you based on how they feel about those situations. But Drew gets to dictate how she’s drawn from her own experiences and how they shaped her, not the public.

That said, the article goes into much more detail about the ghosts that haunt Drew and the decisions she’s made as a result. She described sending her daughters, Olive and Frankie, to camp and having to call her therapist (who took her back when she stopped drinking) to assure her that she wasn’t abandoning her kids. She had to accept in that moment, “This is not me being a bad mom. This is not my childhood. There’s a lot of stuff I have to work through.” So I get what Cameron is saying. She’s known Drew since they came and got her, and she had to put her life back together from there. I don’t think we know how hard she had it. We saw much of Drew working through it, but we probably don’t know what was going on.

But as much as I want to see Drew continue to heal, she has to learn who it’s okay to touch people and when to keep her hands to herself. It’s not ‘okay’ because it’s Drew petting you. That’s not okay period.

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