For Drew Barrymore, a day of work has never been missed. Though her current role as host of The Drew Barrymore Show occupies her days now, when the child star found herself emancipated from her mother Jaid Barrymore at age 14, she scrambled to pay the bills.

Noting that her friend worked at a coffee shop in the Valley, the actress shared in her 2015 memoir Wildflower that she had to find something closer to their rental because she didn’t have a driver’s license.

“It was the start of the 1990s, and coffeehouses were where everyone hung out,” she detailed about working at L.A. hot spot the Living Room. “People poured out onto the street every night.” Unfortunately, she continued, “I wasn’t great at my job. I wasn’t really great at anything. I had only done two things: acted and had wild life experiences.”

She shared a tense experience in her book.

“I could tell my boss, who had hired me on the novel idea of having a washed-up former child actor behind the counter, was patient with all my learning curves but was also irritated with me,” she wrote, revealing how he walked in while she was doing the dishes “and said, very sharply and exasperatedly, ‘Don’t use the abrasive side of the brush! All the pastry cases are getting scratched and foggy, and you can’t see what’s inside!'”