Parenting & Family Quote by Julia Roberts

Roberts lands the punchline by pretending, for a beat, to grant moral gravity to one of America’s cushiest burdens: being born into the Bush dynasty. “Take a deep breath” and “think about” sets up the cadence of civic empathy, the kind deployed after tragedy or scandal. Then she swaps in “being a Bush daughter,” a deliberately disproportionate object for that empathy, and caps it with the loaded phrase “that cross to bear.” The religious metaphor is doing two jobs at once: it mocks the family’s own often-performed piety, and it winks at how fame and privilege still come packaged with genuine scrutiny.

The second sentence is where Roberts’ celebrity persona becomes the delivery system. “I’d go out and have a couple of drinks too” is conversational, almost sisterly, as if she’s defending a friend’s messy night. But it’s also a cultural read: when you’re publicly branded by your father’s politics, the “party girl” narrative becomes both escape and performance. Roberts implicitly critiques the tabloid pipeline that turns political lineage into lifestyle content, then judges the resulting behavior as either decadence or coping, depending on what sells.

The context is early-2000s America, when the Bush years fused governance, brand management, and relentless paparazzi economics. Roberts doesn’t absolve; she reframes. The joke works because it toggles between compassion and indictment, inviting us to notice how quickly we moralize women’s visible coping mechanisms while treating the machinery that produces the spectacle as background noise.