Minka Kelly and Drew Barrymore Bond Over Complicated Relationship with their Mothers

Please welcome the lovely, wonderful, beautiful Minka Kelly, everybody. I have known each other for years. We actually did a TV show together. Yeah. Then we're texting like crazy because your book came out and I love the title. Tell me everything. Because it has so much behind that. It feels like, well, that's a very open heart. That is also going to give me a lot of information because it's everything's going to be in there. It feels like a relationship in the making just from the title. And I was wondering when the title came about, were you how did you feel about it? I love that question because the whole time writing the book, I didn't know what to call it. Really? Yeah, literally until I wrote that last page. And I was just having this spiritual conversation with her at the end of this. And I just literally wrote that down. What was it like for you? And this is Minka's mom. It is the reason that for me, and I think we can all relate to so many different things. In our case, there was so much circumstances that were aligned. Single moms, moms who worked. Your mom worked. My mom worked at like the Troubadour and the Comedy Store around just tons of partying and hedonism and stuff. Your mom worked at Crazy Horse. Crazy Girls. Crazy Girls. The Strip Club. The Strip Club. And when I would go to my mom's work, I like I loved it. I loved being around adults. There was a backstage feeling. My mom also did a lot of theater. So like I just felt like I was always in the room where everybody was getting ready. Yeah. And the way that you set up the book with going to your mom's work and all the women who work there, I just really related to sort of what it feels like. And I mean, it's behind the scenes at these early ages. Like the impression that you left was so you know how to paint a picture. So and then you would go to the grocery store with your mom and Rock and Roll Ralphs, which I went to, too. We lived in the same neighborhood. Crazy. And so all those like apartments that you're in and out of with your mom, like that is the neighborhood. And yet you would go to Rock and Roll Ralphs and like 2 a.m. twirling around in the carts, picking, you know, some groceries up, kind of having a beautiful moment. And there's a lot of romance to it, too. But it's not an easy way to grow up when you're also transient, living at other people's houses. You get to know other families and how they're doing it. Some are like as, you know, kind of unorthodox as are some were a little more traditional. Yeah. The crazy father who's like in and out. I mean, is there anything we didn't have in common growing up? I don't know. I think that's also why and how we connected when we first did when we started to work together, when we would meet for drinks and have these chats, it was like, I think we have a lot in common. And I think we didn't even realize how much we had in common, maybe until all of this. But I think that may be why we were able to just connect. I think maybe just spiritually, because I think when you have similar backgrounds, there's a certain level of energy that maybe bonds you to someone that that you have that in common with. I think it's like also a survival skill. You know, you realize really young that you're living in an adult world. You're not in a kid's world. There's not other kids around. You're not in schools. It's just not that life. Correct. No sibling. No. And and but it didn't seem like a bad thing at the time. No, because when you're at the time, when you're that young, everything just is what it is. And it is normal to you because you don't know anything else. That's right. Yeah. Although when I would go to people's houses that I had, like the pictures from like family vacations and like the siblings and like framed photos used to be something that I found triggering. And I also coveted and admired. Yeah. Yeah. God, I can relate to that dinner with your family. Like what? I don't. My mom ate standing up off a paper plate. Once you've survived that, I think it creates such an amazing strength. You can be a victim and you can use it as a weakness and you can blame others. That is a choice. Yeah. You can also make it your empowerment. I think the most important thing that I learned is that I have this deeper understanding of like I had it wrong the whole time. I didn't love myself. I kept trying to love outward. I kept trying to get love from other people. Oh, yeah. And I didn't know that loving myself or trying to trust myself was this goal that I didn't even know I was trying to reach because I didn't know it was the goal. As soon as I stopped outsourcing my self-worth and my safety to everyone else around me, things changed. And it took a life coach to help me with that. Literally, I needed I had so many therapists and that's great. All of the therapies are wonderful, but it literally just took a friend who was just so much smarter than me in all these ways, helping me do things differently and actually teaching me how and what that means to love yourself and to stop outsourcing your safety to everyone else. I didn't. I'm like, what does that mean? Love yourself. It sounds like such an abstract idea. And reading your book, I got all of that. It is such a beautiful journey. OK, is it true that your gentleman who you are so lovely with and have been with now for a few years, did he read your book before he spent time? Yes. We'd been FaceTiming and talking and texting before we met because I was out of the country working and a mutual friend was like, you guys should talk. And and I accidentally just said, what a crazy day today. I just turned in my final pages. I wrote a book and he's like, I want to read it. And so I was like, OK, well, here you go. You'll either be terrified and run for the hills or you'll see, you know, you'll see the beauty in all of it. And he fortunately was the latter. And it just made us, you know, closer. I mean, God, if we had all come with a handbook, you come with a dossier about our lives. Yeah. How amazing would that actually be? It's scary. It is scary. The scariest things are the most rewarding and the most healing. I'm finding Minka Kelly. I have loved you for so long and I continue to love you every day.