DREW BARRYMORE FINDING HOME

Drew Barrymore’s life has been dominated by movies, but as the pandemic raged she realised home is where her heart is. She snuggled down with her daughters, some chickens, and penned a cookbook. This is her story ...

- DREW BARRYMORE

It’s been two years since I decided to write a cookbook. I never thought that would ever happen. I think because way back in the 1990s, when I was at an impressionable age, all these lifestyle “gurus” seemed so perfect to me: “Follow me; do as I do.” I know well that isn’t me – I am messy and will be a student until the day I die.

When I was a teenager the only thing I could see myself doing was making movies, so I started Flower Films at 19 and spent the next 15 years completely focused on that. We made a whole bunch of movies and had a whole lot of fun, although I probably stressed through it way more than I should have. Now, looking back, I see a young, invincible idiot who thought stress would never kill me and I would live forever. And now, at 46, I am going to try to take you on the journey of the past two years.

As a young girl who grew up around the world, working from job to job, location to location, I knew that I was lucky, because it made me very aware of the many different types of lives lived everywhere. It also gave me an extremely eclectic appetite for food and design. The more I travelled, the more I fell in love with everything I could get my eyes on and in my mouth. And finally, somewhere in my mid-20s, I became a true homemaker, realising that travelling all the time was so tiring and expensive, and that I really did have no anchor in the world. So maybe the zip code 90046 [Los Angeles], a neighbourhood I had lived in since I was born and never strayed from for long, maybe that was my home?