I watched her, and after a little while, she really looked at me. Barrymore recounts “wailing” and “gasping for air” before it hits her: Frankie looked like her mother, Jaid Barrymore, whom she describes as her “biggest emotional button”. At 20, she started her own production company and had produced and starred in Never Been Kissed in the following years. “But it did give an unbelievable discipline”. Thankfully Barrymore was able to get her life back on track but believes it wouldn’t have happened without those 18 months locked away from the rest of the world. “I really dedicate it to my kids”. In an interview for The Guardian, Barrymore opened up about her troubled childhood, time in an institution, divorce from her mother, and her relationship with Stephen Spielberg. “It was like serious recruitment training and boot camp, and it was awful and dark and very long-lived, a year and a half, but I needed it. I needed that whole insane discipline”.
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Barrymore’s mother put her into an institution when she was 12.
Drew credits her positive perspective on body image in part to her husband of three years, Will Kopelman, saying, “I think that’s really important for women to have someone who really makes you feel good about yourself because that would be a giant disadvantage to your process of making babies or just being a woman in general to have someone make you feel like you had to be a certain way to turn them on or to be handsome in their eyes”. “I had none. I had the weirdest life ever”. But it was a very quiet thing.
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“I am not going to pretend I am not who I am”. I think it takes a lot of self-confidence and a fair bit of courage to shake off those expectations, and even more to publicly admit our so-called imperfections and accept them. “I’m going to show them how it got me to where I am now”. “I came out in a very different way… but I still was me”.
