Review: Wildflower by Drew Barrymore.

Book: Wildflower

Author: Drew Barrymore

Pages: 264

Read On: My iPad

How Long Time It Took Me To Read: 2 hours or so.

Plot Summary: Award-winning actress Drew Barrymore shares funny, insightful, and profound stories from her past and present told from the place of happiness she's achieved today.

Wildflower is a portrait of Drew's life in stories as she looks back on the adventures, challenges, and incredible experiences of her earlier years. It includes tales of living on her own at 14 (and how laundry may have saved her life), getting stuck in a gas station overhang on a cross country road trip, saying goodbye to her father in a way only he could have understood, and many more adventures and lessons that have led her to the successful, happy, and healthy place she is today. It is the first book Drew has written about her life since the age of 14.
General Thoughts: I like Drew Barrymore, I think she is a happy and positive person who has overcome a lot in her life. Her unconventional childhood could have resulted in a very different adult life but she chose to change her life and lifestyle and I find that very commendable. When I heard she had a book out I wanted to give it a read. I read this book in one sitting. It was a quick and easy and very enjoyable read.

Things I Liked: 

1. The writing was conversational, easy, simple yet elegant. It read like blog posts or someone's dairy entries yet it had so much warmth and genuine feelings attached to it. Very nice.

2. I loved the chapters about Drew's daughters Olive and Frankie. So lovely to read about her girls.

3. I also liked the chapters about her friendships and partnerships and her process of making films. Very interesting. I also enjoyed reading about her other famous friends- Adam Sandler and Cameron Diaz.

4. My absolute favourite bits have had to be about her childhood and her living alone at age 14 and learning to live alone and working at a coffeeshop and being an adult at such an young age.

5. There is a chapter about her deep love and bond with her pet dogs and it was heart-warming and heart-breaking to read and put a smile on my face and made me tear up in the end.

6. There was a chapter on India which being an Indian I liked reading about.

7. The most interesting and intense bits of this book were the ones about her childhood, her very unconventional and non-traditional childhood. Her parents sound like such free spirits who aren't the most stable parents and reading about them and their parenting style made for interesting reading.

Things I Didn't Like: 

I liked this book for most part. It was a quick read and an easy read. But there were some things I didn't exactly love...

1. The book is not in chronological order or in any order. It goes from her childhood to making movies now, to her daughters, to meeting her husband..it can seem a little chaotic.

2. There is a lot that Drew doesn't talk about...her addictions as a child, about her equation with her mother and her earlier marriage. I get it, it's her life and her book and her choice about what she wants to write about. And what she decides to omit. However, her life story seemed to miss so many chapters and this was not a whole life.

3. This is a book that you should probably dip in and out of. Not the perfect thing to read in one sitting like I did...

Rating: 3.5/5