Hello!
I am typing this while I listen to one of my favorite musicians, Serge Gainsbourg. His album Vie Héröique is amazing. You might want to give him a try. 😉
I don’t know if you have heard about this hype about Drew Barrymore’s book ‘Wildflower’. I read about how amazing it is on so many blogs, in newspapers, online articles and whatnot so I got sucked into it and read it. Well, we basically all know and love little Drew Barrymore from the movie E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982). Growing up, Barrymore had a troubled childhood with drugs involved when she was just nine years old. It did not stop there but has gotten worse. She survived a suicide attack and has been in and out of rehab. This rebellious era lasted for a while with one bad relationship after the other. Barrymore was quoted in 2004 saying, “A woman and a woman together are beautiful, just as a man and a woman together are beautiful. Being with a woman is like exploring your own body, but through someone else. When I was younger I used to go with lots of women. Totally. I love it”. She had several boyfriends and married three times. Her third marriage with Will Kopelman still works well. They have two daughters together. She is well into acting and now she came out with her latest book Wildflower.
Barrymore is very enthusiastic which rubs off on her writing. She is a great actress and I love to see her on stage but I found that the storytelling in her book is too confusing. She is jumping back and forth and all over the place with surprisingly bad writing. Her book is a collection of stories from her life but she does not want to call Wildflower an autobiography. There are some stories of her childhood but for some reason there is no chronological order in any of her stories. It is just a constant jumping around which I found very confusing. I enjoyed when she wrote about her acting career, especially E.T. and The Wedding Singer.
I think the book lacks focus even though she has had a pretty wild life and experienced so much and has a plethora of stories to tell. However, most stories are written really badly and dull. Others are bubbly and cute but never caught me to really enjoy this book. The pace and story is somewhat like this:
I am glad that she straightened her life out. Now, at 40-years-old, she is married with two daughters and seems more comfortable and settled with herself and her surroundings. She mentioned that she loves being a mother and is doing everything in her power to be more loving and nurturing than her parents were with her. I love reading memoirs, autobiographies and such. It is possibly my favorite genre. Reading an autobiography, for me, seems like taking to the author. Getting to know him personally through his own voice while reading about his life. I did not have this feeling once while reading Wildflower. It just felt like a dramatic performance of Drew Barrymore trying really hard to convince everyone that she is now a writer.
I thought and wished to learn something more about one of my favorite actresses but instead I learned a lot about the people she hung out with. Maybe you want to pick up the book but for me Drew Barrymore will remain an actress and not a writer.
Thank you for reading my blog.
