I knew Drew Barrymore had a talk show, but I did not know she also had a magazine. I did know that she’d gotten sober. Nearly a year ago, Drew revealed that she had been sober since 2019. She sought treatment in Utah around the time of her divorce. She spoke about it on her talk show last year and has now written about it in an essay for her magazine. She talks about how she feels now that she’s removed alcohol from her life.

Drew Barrymore says quitting drinking has freed her “of the torture of guilt and dysfunction.”

The actress and talk show host got candid about her sobriety in the winter issue of her magazine Drew. She said that eliminating alcohol from her life has been “liberating.”

In her “Take Care of Yourself” essay, via Entertainment Tonight, the 47-year-old, who got sober in 2019, wrote about self-care and putting wellness first.

“One of the bravest things you can do is slay those dragons and finally change an awful cycle in which you’ve found yourself stuck,” the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial star wrote. “For me, it was to stop drinking.”

She called saying goodbye to booze “one of the most liberating things in my journey of life.” Barrymore said it has allowed her “to finally become free of the torture of guilt and dysfunction.”

Barrymore first revealed in December 2021 that she had been sober for 2 1/2 years following her divorce from Will Kopelman, with whom she shares daughters Olive, 10, and Frankie, 8. She told CBS Mornings that alcohol “was something that I realized just did not serve me and my life.” On her eponymous talk show around the same time, she revealed that she went to a Utah treatment facility around the time of the 2016 split to “change my life. I wasn’t doing very well and I just wanted to go talk to some people on how to pull myself out of a hole.”

Also around that time, she quietly stopped making her Barrymore Wines.

[From Yahoo! Entertainment]

I have to admit, when I learned last year that Drew was sober, I was confused. I think I was aware of her since discontinued wine line, but also was aware of her rehab visits from when she was barely a teen. I guess I was confused about exactly what she was abstaining from previously, though it seems like before it was drugs and now it’s drugs and alcohol. Good for Drew for realizing that drinking didn’t serve her life and seeking help. She saw what the drinking was doing to her life and felt she was in a dark place and worked to get out of it. And now she feels liberated and has broken that cycle, which I imagine allows her to feel more present in her life. The fact that she’d had experience with treatment before was probably all the more helpful for her. It’s hard to admit something is wrong in your life, so it is very brave of Drew to make that change and get sober.

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