Like his daughter, John Drew Barrymore also suffered from addiction. The condition made him prone to violent outbursts, something that was present since Drew Barrymore’s first memory of him. Drew, age 3 at the time, was doing laundry with her mother when John walked in and attacked Jaid Barrymore. “Then he turned on me … he picked me up and threw me into the wall,” she wrote in her 1991 autobiography “Little Girl Lost.” John’s reaction wasn’t to turn around and check on her.
John just left the room after breaking a bottle of tequila. “That was the first time I remember seeing my dad,” Drew wrote. From early on, Jaid kept John away. Because she never saw him, Drew longed for a relationship with him. “I had this fantasy in my mind, that I was going to have ‘Father Knows Best’ walk through the door. I wanted that so bad, and I wasn’t going to face reality that it wasn’t going to happen,” she told The Associated Press in 1990 (via Irish Examiner)
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But as Drew shot to fame and began grappling with her own issues, she began to understand where he was coming from. “Somehow I have zero baggage or dad issues,” she wrote in a June 2020 Instagram post. Barrymore also learned a thing or two about parenting from her own experience. “Both my parents have played a major role in who [I] am as a parent. And none of it looks perfect,” she wrote.
