Drew Barrymore: the day I divorced my mother – extract
When I was 14, I was emancipated by the courts. It’s no secret that I had to part ways from my mother because we had driven our relationship into the ground. She had lost credibility as a mother by taking me to Studio 54 (so wrong, but so fun) instead of school. And I was out of control due to working since I was 11 months old and what that had done to my childhood, which made me grow up too fast. Work was a very positive thing in my life, and sadly it had been taken away, because my mother also put me in an institution because she felt helpless. But when people found out, they just wrote me off as damaged goods, and I sadly understood that.
I was never unprofessional, but I was on a hiatus from being employable. And when I turned 14 and wanted to start my life over, I wanted to do things on my own terms. On the day of my hearing, my mother was there in full support of my emancipation, which would mean me living on my own. I felt so sad, but too much had happened. The judge walked in and the day went on in a blur. People testified, but it wasn’t heavy or dark. It was a way to ask, “Should this kid become an adult?” At the end of the day, the judge looked at me and said these words, which stuck with me: “I can turn the clock forward, but I can never turn it back. Are you ready for that?”
“Yes,” I said.
“OK,” he said with a slight smile, “I hereby pronounce you an adult.”
My mom and I hugged, knowing things would be different, but things were always just too different, and that was why this needed to happen. I walked out an 18-year‑old in the eyes of the state of California. This was gonna be fun.
Out with Jaid. Photograph: Getty Images
First I needed an apartment. I looked all over West Hollywood, my favourite neighbourhood and where I had grown up. I found a place in the back of a building where my friend Justine was living. Although it was off an alleyway in a notoriously “don’t walk around here at night” neighbourhood, I was happy that my girlfriend was a stone’s throw away. She lived there with her boyfriend, and I was always secretly willing them to break up, because I would fantasise about Justine and me getting our own bungalow somewhere. Boys were a whole other chapter that I knew I wasn’t up for yet.
I needed a job. Justine worked at a coffeehouse in the Valley, but she had a car and I was two years away from getting my driver’s licence, so I went to the coffeehouse near us, the Living Room, which happened to be one of the big LA hot spots at night. It was the start of the 1990s, and coffeehouses were where everyone hung out. People poured out on to the street every night.
I wasn’t great at my job. I wasn’t really great at anything. I had only done two things: acted and had wild life experiences. But neither of those prepares you for the real world. My apartment was a mess. It smelled like wood from the Ikea pieces I had bought that still lay in their boxes, and my fridge was a science project. I only had takeout cartons that had lost their shapes, but much worse, they had all grown spores. I didn’t even know you were supposed to throw them away. I would just place the remains of my meals back in the fridge, next to a half-eaten sandwich.
I was very alone. I needed something to comfort me. I opened a classic novel I had acquired and read myself to sleep. Somewhere around when the sun came up, I felt safe enough to close my eyes, my book right next to me like a stuffed animal or the lover I wasn’t old enough to have.
I went to work the next day, and I could tell my boss, who had hired me on the novel idea of having a washed-up former child actor behind the counter, was patient with all my learning curves, but was also irritated with me. He came in when I was doing dishes (which, come to think of it, probably helped me realise you actually had to “do” dishes rather than just put everything in the sink and pray, like I did at home), but he walked in and said, very sharply and exasperatedly, “Don’t use the abrasive side of the brush! All the pastry cases are getting scratched and foggy, and you can’t see what’s inside!”
He looked at me with wide eyes and clearly went in the other room to mutter “idiot” under his breath. I went back to my apartment after work, feeling like a bit of a loser. I looked around the dirty apartment. Everything I touched had turned to shit. The fridge. The sink! The furniture that lay lifeless on the floor in 50 pieces. And the laundry. I didn’t even know what I was wearing because everything I owned was in that basket, taunting me. I hurled myself on the bed and clutched my pillow, staring at the wall all night. As the sun crept into the creepy alley outside my bedroom window, I knew I had survived another night. But this wasn’t what I pictured when I left that courthouse with a skip in my step. Something had to give.
T
he first time I went to a laundromat, I was talking to myself all the way. “Bleach first, detergent, wait, bleach and detergent? That doesn’t sound right. And the liquid fabric softener goes in the dryer? But isn’t that going to make the clothes wet all over again?” I was very confused.
At home in LA in the 80s. Photograph: Rex
I walked in. I went to the machines. Which ones were which? The circle shapes all around started to close in on me. I was screwed. I just stood there. After a while, like a kid cheating on a test, I just started to spy on whatever other people were doing. Needless to say, I put the bleach directly on the clothes, then I put the liquid fabric softener right in the dryer. When I pulled out the dalmatian-spotted jeans and the gummy towels, I knew I had done it all wrong.
I needed Justine to tell me what to do. And once I had mastered it, I began actually to look forward to the laundry. I didn’t feel alone there. I could be domestic, read my book and eat Chinese from the place next door in a carton with chopsticks.
What was my next adventure going to be? Once I was emancipated, I had simply dropped out of school. I had been on film sets my whole life, receiving three hours a day of tutoring. I hated it when I went back to school, because kids were merciless, a chapter you are supposed to face. I wasn’t going back voluntarily, but I didn’t want to be uneducated.
What did I want to learn? “I know acting,” I thought, “but that’s gone for now, and I don’t know if they will have me back.” People thought I was crazy, even though I wasn’t; I just grew up too fast.
I decided to create my own school, to self-educate: I will buy a dictionary and study every word. I will steep myself in all the things I love. I decided right then and there I would not be defeated. I would create my own curriculum. And so I did just that: I read, I cleaned, I worked.
Back at the coffeehouse, my boss was having another “you suck at this” moment with me. He looked at me with those saucer eyes of his one last time and said to me with clenched teeth, “Why don’t you go out and find yourself?” And even though he was half trying to get rid of me, he was right. I looked around: this wasn’t my destiny.
I quit that day. Went back to my apartment, went right up to Justine’s door and said to her, “If I found us a new place to live, would you ever want to move out and be room-mates and get the hell out of this shit hole?”
She looked at me. “Well, Darren and I just broke up, so sure! I’m in.”
I ran back to my place and started circling apartments for rent in the paper. Listening to the cats fighting in the alley, I looked out of my window and waited, as I did each morning, for the sun to come up to tell me everything was going to be OK. And it was.
This is an edited extract from Wildflower, by Drew Barrymore, published by Virgin Books at £16.99. To order a copy for £11.89, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.