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Review

Waldo walks out of an airport terminal not because she has found courage or clarity but because her body will not let her board the plane. She has spent 85 chapters chasing a married forty-year-old teacher who now stands at the gate with two tickets to Hawaii and a scavenger hunt of macadamia-nut clues, trying to revive a relationship that died the moment she finally possessed him. Her calves go weak, her mouth floods with saliva, her hands shake, and some older, animal part of her understands what her mind still refuses: this is not love, this was never love, and getting on that flight would be an act of violence against herself. Jennette McCurdy’s debut novel Half His Age has been read, correctly, as a story about a predatory affair between a seventeen-year-old and her creative writing teacher. But that framing misses what the book most distinctively achieves. This is not a novel that diagnoses abuse and prescribes recovery, nor a cautionary tale that scaffolds itself with unambiguous moral clarity. It is something stranger and sharper: a sustained, almost clinical dismantling of the fantasy that wanting something intensely is evidence of its value, and that having it will make you whole.

Waldo is a working-class teenager in Anchorage, Alaska, whose early sexual experiences are a catalogue of numbness. In the novel’s opening pages she lies beneath Randy Julep while mentally escaping to an imaginary lover; when her body signals its refusal, she leaves mid-intercourse, and the relationship dissolves without drama. She spends her nights tab-shopping through Shein hauls and watching beauty tutorials, filling the hours with what she later diagnoses as substitute-wants—easier, smaller things to desire in place of “the bigger, insatiable” thing she cannot name. Her mother, a Safeway bagger and former stripper, cycles through men with a rhythm Waldo has memorized: hope, disappointment, the broken Seward road-trip promise, then the next man. When senior year begins and Mr. Theodore Korgy walks into creative writing, opens class by confessing he gave up his dream of being a novelist, and tells the room that he is a failure, Waldo feels something she has never felt before.

“My vagina pulses,” she narrates. “It’s not about him being a failure. I don’t know whose vagina would pulse at that. It’s about him being able to call himself one.” This is McCurdy’s method in miniature: Waldo’s voice is a near-continuous interior monologue that insists on registering the body’s judgments even when they embarrass or contradict her, and that treats the act of a middle-aged man confessing his weakness as an aphrodisiac without bothering to locate it within a tidy therapeutic framework. The attraction is not explained away; it is simply reported, and the novel’s long middle section is a virtuosic excavation of what it feels like to be inside a desire you know is catastrophic but cannot stop wanting anyway.

What follows is structurally precise. Korgy assigns an “I am from” poem, and Waldo delivers a brutally autobiographical verse that ends with locked eyes across the classroom. He tells her she has “a voice” that no other student possesses, a line of praise that functions as the affair’s ignition. She masturbates in a bathroom stall to his Instagram family photos. He invites her to dinner with his wife Gwen, a woman of “tranquil domesticity” whose linen ease Waldo studies as proof of a personhood she cannot replicate. On a coastal walk at Black Friday, she kisses him; he rejects her. He then disappears for two weeks. At winter formal she finds him alone in his classroom, climbs into his lap, and grinds against him until he comes through his khakis; he apologizes and says it can never happen again. At a coffee shop called Sleepy Dog he tells her, “I do have feelings for you, and they… keep me up at night. But there’s nothing I can do about them.” She extracts a promise that he will think about it, and soon he is in her apartment, drunk, taking in the white-trash details before they have sex on her twin bed for the first time.

The novel’s governing insight about scarcity is embedded in the architecture of the affair. Their encounters are snatched in cleaning closets, ducked-down Subaru rides, a Beluga Point picnic he cancels and then reinstates. Korgy’s absences inflame her; his intermittent texts are screenshots of need. She breaks into his house, masturbates with his cologne in his bed, and watches their wedding video, narrating her rationalizations in a free indirect discourse that makes the reader feel the logic and its falseness simultaneously: “What I’m about to do is not deranged… it will comfort me… so by association, he would want me to do this.” When Korgy finally breaks up with her, crying that “Things that are right shouldn’t hurt you” and insisting she is wasting her potential on him, the speech is so perfectly patterned on her mother’s man-cycling that Waldo recognizes it as a rehearsed exit—softer words that let him off the hook while performing concern.

The rebound section, in which Waldo pursues a bland classmate named Nolan, is one of McCurdy’s canniest moves. Nolan is gentle, age-appropriate, entirely present, and Waldo cannot feel a thing. On a double date she locks eyes with Korgy across a diner, excuses herself to the bathroom, and masturbates to his Instagram with chili-cheese fingers, narrating the act in the same deadpan register she uses for shopping hauls. The point is not that Waldo is broken, but that the desire she has been calling love was always a structure of distance. Nolan is available, and the novel’s logic suggests that availability strips the wanting of its charge—a discovery Waldo will not fully articulate until later, when she and Korgy are finally living together in a cramped loft, and she realizes that “scarcity is tension, excess is whatever this is.”

The second act of the affair follows the consequences of Korgy leaving his wife. Everything Waldo believed she wanted arrives: mornings in his arms, his belongings in boxes on the lawn, the A Clockwork Orange poster finally on the wall. And everything she believed she wanted curdles. The domesticity is oppressive; the French films on the Criterion Channel bore her; Korgy presses his morning erection against her and calls his penis “my guy” while she manufactures wetness with phlegm. Their sex becomes a site of performance so hollow that when he reframes her deadness as “the healthy settling of an adult relationship,” the reader understands the line as a second-order self-deception—not a lie to her but a lie he believes about himself. Waldo’s interior strips it away without needing to editorialize:

We’re not special. We’re just two people who were brought together because of how fucking lost we both were.

The resolution does not come from insight or courage. It comes from the body. Throughout the novel McCurdy has threaded a motif of somatic verdicts—from the opening sex with Randy, where “eventually, the body says no more,” through the vagina-pulse at Korgy’s confession, to the manufactured arousal of the later chapters, tracked in obsessive detail. At the airport gate, Waldo’s body stages a revolt that her mind cannot override. “My body knows more than I do,” she thinks.

My body's instincts are loud. And they're right. And they're appropriate and reasonable and they are not a nuisance. They are wise. They are giving me all the information I need.

She walks out the terminal door in the opposite direction, and the distance between this refusal and her earlier rationalizations is the entire arc of the book.

McCurdy then places this exit in parallel with two others. Waldo arrives home to find her mother, who has recently joined Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, in bed with Tony, the truck-driver boyfriend she swore off. Earlier, Mom had recited the recovery vocabulary—her broken heart is her responsibility, she has a sponsor named Margie, she is doing no-contact—and for a moment it had seemed to hold. Now it doesn’t. Waldo’s response is not rage or despair but “a wave of recognition and peace, from finally lowering her expectations of someone.” The novel ends not with Waldo healed, not with Korgy punished, not with a therapeutic breakthrough, but with her driving alone toward Seward, the long-deferred road trip finally taken, her phone off, ignoring his calls and her mother’s, wanting for nothing.

This is a quiet but radical ending, and it exposes what the book has been doing all along. Half His Age is a novel that sits inside a set of contemporary discourses—the language of love addiction and twelve-step recovery, the feminist critique of grooming and power imbalances, the materialist analysis of self-worth as a commodity—and tests them to the point of exhaustion. Waldo’s best friend Frannie offers the clean victim narrative: Korgy is an abuser, and she should report him. The novel does not dispute the facts, but it refuses the comfort of that framing as a way to close the emotional question. Waldo’s agency is both real and compromised; her desire is both her own and shaped by a man who knew exactly what he was doing. The book holds those facts in suspension without collapsing them into a lesson.

Similarly, the novel does not endorse the recovery discourse it presents. Mom’s SLAA language is accurate, and some of it—Margie’s dictum that a broken heart is the owner’s responsibility—resonates. But the novel shows that naming a pattern is not the same as breaking it, and that the vocabulary of healing can be appropriated as easily as the vocabulary of honesty. Korgy’s entire seduction runs on truth: he owns being a bad guy, confesses his failures, tells Waldo his feelings keep him up at night. Each confession licenses further harm. The novel’s real argument about honesty is that self-aware wrongdoing is often worse than the unexamined kind, because it provides an alibi while changing nothing.

What sustains the novel through its 88 short chapters is the voice. McCurdy writes in a first-person present-tense-ish stream that feels engineered to disarm the reader’s defenses. The narration catalogs the world through brands—Shein, Sephora, Forever 21, Bath & Body Works—not as lazy set-dressing but as a characterization system. Waldo’s shopping binges are a managed substitute for the unmet need she cannot speak. “There’s something about how assured they are in those pretty little fonts,” she thinks, scrolling a product page, “that feels more credible than the ones coming out of people’s mouths.” The materialist critique is built into the texture of the prose rather than announced. When a Victoria’s Secret customer asks Waldo if she knows her worth, the question triggers an internal debate about whether human value is real or a sentimental product sold in jars:

We’re just gross little people who shit and fart and fuck. Who eat too much dairy and search for meaning in our iPhones and carry at least one undiagnosed mental illness. People who, maybe, aren’t worth much at all.

The novel refuses to resolve this question. Waldo’s final stillness, her “wanting for nothing,” does not arrive because she has found her worth; it arrives because she has stopped needing the question to be answered.

In the tradition of confessional literary realism, Half His Age sits alongside novels that render young women’s interiority with unsparing candor—the bad sex, the compulsive behavior, the gap between what one knows and what one feels. But where some of those novels can drift into a kind of stylish abjection for its own sake, McCurdy’s book is structurally disciplined. The affair is not the subject; it is the laboratory. The cross-references embedded in the text reinforce this: Randy’s dog-eared copy of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is a satirical jab at a culture that packages indifference as liberation, an ethos Waldo performs but never inhabits. Korgy’s curated canon—Chekhov, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, The Criterion Collection, the French New Wave films he forces on her—doubles as a critique of a certain kind of male mentorship that uses art as a seduction tool while positioning the girl as an empty vessel to be filled. Waldo never takes to the films, and the novel makes clear that her real art was always the raw autobiographical honesty of the “I am from” poem, which Korgy co-opts as a talent he discovered.

The book is not flawless. Its central anxieties—shopping, menstruation, her mother’s pattern—recur so often that they can begin to feel like a loop rather than a deepening. Some of the middle chapters, particularly after the first breakup, rework the same emotional terrain without sharpening it, and the shopping-binge passages, charged as they are initially, occasionally tip into monotony. The secondary characters remain largely functions: Gwen is a silhouette of wifely ease, Frannie a foil of performative virtue, Nolan a flat decency that never quite coheres into a person. This is partly a consequence of Waldo’s narrative stranglehold—the novel is her consciousness, and her consciousness is interested in these people only as obstacles or mirrors—but it means that the social world of the novel can feel thin, an Anchorage populated by types.

Yet what the novel attempts, and largely achieves, is a specific kind of difficulty. It asks the reader to sit inside a desire that is recognizable and repellent, to watch a teenager pursue a man twice her age without the safety rails of a didactic narrator, and to track the slow death of that desire without the redemption of a breakthrough. It refuses to let Waldo off the hook even as it holds Korgy accountable; it refuses to let Korgy be a monster even as it details his predation. This is uneasy ground, and some readers will find the moral ambiguity a failure of nerve. But to read the novel as anything other than a deliberate and carefully constructed refusal of tidy conclusions is to misread its architecture. The ending is not a victory, and it is not a tragedy. It is an exhaustion that opens into something that looks, from the right angle, like peace.

The book is for readers who can tolerate a novel that dismantles its own romantic engine in real time, who do not need a protagonist to become a better person in order to be worth following, and who can feel the difference between a body’s knowledge and a mind’s rationalization as an engine of narrative. It is a novel that gets something right about the economics of desire—that longing is a structure sustained by distance, and that closing the distance does not satisfy the longing but annihilates it. And it gets something right about the limits of language: the recovery terms, the confessions, the “I love you” that changes nothing. What remains after all the words have been deployed and found wanting is a girl in a car, on a highway, alone, wanting for nothing. That is not a cure. But it is, the novel argues, a kind of arrival.