Little Girl Lost Drew Barrymore Read Online

Letter of Recommendation

It's more than just a memoir: It's logistically stupefying, touching and absolutely packed with choice late-'80s gossip.

Credit... Jason Fulford for The New York Times

Drew Barrymore had her outset cigarette when she was 9. Within 3 years, she would drink her first beer, fume her first bowl and do her get-go bump of coke. Soon she was regularly going to a nightclub in Silverlake, a spot favored by Jack Nicholson and Madonna and run by a family unit friend. Barrymore and her young pals had a routine: They would go up to the balcony, rip cigs and keep spotter for drinks to swipe downwards below. "A few times we passed out up there, slept for several hours and woke upwardly with awe-inspiring headaches," Barrymore would later write, "a combination of the alcohol and lying with our ears right beside the speakers." It was 1990 when she published those words, and she was fourteen, having already lived long and hard enough to write a rehab memoir, "Little Girl Lost."

I first came across the book thanks to a quick visual gag on an episode of "High Maintenance," the weirdo album comedy. I ordered a copy online, assuming I wasn't getting annihilation more an archaic bit of kitsch. Cracking open the out-of-print paperback, I was surprised to observe myself enthralled. I knew, vaguely, that Barrymore had ridden her post-"E.T." stardom into both a flourishing acting career and a serious cocaine addiction. But the logistics blew my mind.

The stories go on and on and on: a mini-bottle-fueled hotel political party in West Frg with Rod Stewart'southward band; a night out with Apollonia that ended with Barrymore being given a ring the vocaliser wore in "Majestic Rain." Shooting a movie in Manhattan, Barrymore saved taxi money ("precious greenbacks she needed for clubs at nighttime," according to her co-author, Todd Gold) by roller-skating everywhere; she "became a ubiquitous sight along Broadway, speeding in and out of the crowds ... and tiptoeing downward subway steps." In one case, after running away from home, Barrymore found a pay phone and called for help from her friend David Crosby. Barrymore also recalled being detained one time by star-struck private investigators hired by her mother. "God you've simply yanked me out of my house with cuffs on," she writes, "and at present you're asking me what it was similar to meet East.T. What jerks."

As a litany of debauchery, it'south inspiring and unparalleled: Information technology is a uncomplicated and adept truth that most of united states will never go as hard as 12-year-quondam Drew Barrymore. Sure, it's unseemly to be and then in awe of a kid's overindulgences. Only past dissimilarity, my closest brush with narcotics as a preteen was seeing, just not really smoking, a tiny little bit of weed. (My friend's way-libation friend had it in ane of those picayune plastic baggies we used to go on our orthodontic rubber bands in.) Barrymore was a prodigy not but of acting but besides of getting subsequently information technology; to me, it spoke to her elemental life force. Affiliate 9, Sentence one: "I loved cocaine. Period."

In that location's a darkness to it all, of course. Barrymore explains that she wrote the book to counter the narrative of a tawdry National Enquirer exposé ("Eastward.T. Star in Cocaine & Booze Clinic — at thirteen!"). She never argues she didn't do the cocaine and the alcohol. She only wants to provide the necessary context. Reading the National Enquirer headline, you lot're scandalized. Reading her book, y'all're heartbroken — but also fascinated. No kid should have to get through all that, but it's sort of incredible that she managed to.

Hers is a classic Hollywood story, a tale of subconscious despair and faltered appetite. The Barrymore family's acting lineage goes back to the 19th century; its history with addiction goes dorsum near as far. Drew'southward gramps, John Barrymore, was "one of the finest Shakespearean and moving picture actors of the 1920s and 1930s," Gilt writes, and he "drank himself to death at age sixty." Drew'southward own estranged father, as well named John Barrymore, was a physically abusive alcoholic. The beginning time she remembers seeing him, she writes, he stomped into the kitchen, shoved her into a wall and grabbed a bottle of tequila.

These days we get our celebrity meltdowns in unvarnished drip-drip form, ane TMZ or Instagram post at a fourth dimension. We presume that we are getting a pretty good approximation of the truth, that nosotros know how to parse all the information shoved earlier u.s.. But I came to realize that the limiting practicalities of the predigital days had an allure, also. It's like shooting fish in a barrel to imagine a different situation back and then, one in which Barrymore managed to keep her secrets condom. Instead, a deadening and steadily edifice pressure level produced "Little Girl Lost," a thrilling, singular document. Mayhap the truth isn't best captured when nosotros come across everything all the fourth dimension.

Seen in the context of Barrymore's eventual fruitful career, information technology's a reminder that lives are long and complicated. A reminder that people can mess up and repent and mess up over again and keep on doing information technology forever. Months after first getting clean, and while writing the volume, Barrymore relapsed. She really finished the volume while in rehab the 2d time, awaiting discharge.

In the cease, what elevates the memoir is that all the genuinely profound thoughts it provokes are constantly in competition with unbeatable fourth dimension-capsule gossip. Similar, that first beer she had when she was 9? She had it at Rob Lowe'southward 20th-birthday party, and it was handed to her by a member of the extended Deviling Pack universe identified, cuttingly, as "a real Mr. Nice Guy." She strongly implies that it wasn't Emilio Estevez — my outset guess — with whom she had her first slow dance. Judd Nelson? Andrew McCarthy? Look, no — Robert Downey Jr., right? Definitely Robert Downey Jr.?

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-drew-barrymores-little-girl-lost.html

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