Wildflower is a warm, thoughtful collection of Drew Barrymore’s non-chronological memoirs covering childhood, her business, dating and marriage, motherhood, family relationships and friendships.
I’m liking
Drew Barrymore is a few years older than me and always in the background of my world as I grew up: whether it seeing her on ET, rumors about her going off on the deep end in drugs and wild behavior, her totally lovable rom com movies, or seeing her on the magazine covers. She’s held a fascination for me, so reading her memories was a lovely insight into her world and how she sees it. She’s ridiculously down-to-earth and struggles with the same things all mothers do, and yet she’s been incredibly shaped by not having a normal or functioning childhood that she’s driven to make her children’s lives all that much different. My favorite parts were her talking about being a mother, and about her work in Africa which helped heal her of her childhood. Her sheer determination to achieve and to make the most of her life shines through the book.
Things that made me go hmmmm
There’s large deliberate gaps in the memoirs. If you hadn’t known she was married three times, you’d think she only dated and then married her husband. There’s passing mentions of her wild years, and enough for you to get the picture but it’s not by any means insightful into those parts of her life. There’s lot of questions left about her relationship with her mother (probably non-existent).
The conclusion
Towards the end of the book, a UN worker in Africa said to her: “You know when you got here… I just didn’t know if you were full of ****, and it seems like you’re not.” This sums up the book for me. At first, I wonder who Drew Barrymore really is, and if her book is a fluffy feel-good book which glosses over the hard stuff, or if there’s more to it than that. By the end, I felt like I got to know what inside her head was like quite well and really got to like her.
Wildflower is the perfect book to take on holiday. I laughed and cried in the book. It’s very enjoyable.
