Description:

Review

The title of Jennette McCurdy’s memoir functions as a litmus test. Before a reader has opened the book, the phrase “I’m Glad My Mom Died” sorts the audience into those who recoil and those who recognize something true in the provocation. The memoir opens not with explanation but with an image that retroactively condenses its entire argument: an eleven-year-old girl in an ICU, leaning close to her comatose mother to whisper that she has finally reached eighty-nine pounds. She is certain this news will wake her. The mother is Debra McCurdy — a stage-four cancer survivor, architect of Jennette’s acting career, and the source of the eating disorder she began teaching her daughter at the same age. The child’s whispered gift is the product of everything Debra built. That the book’s title is not a death wish but a declaration of relief — once Mom was gone, Jennette could begin the work of dismantling the false foundation her “entire existence” had been built on — is the argument the memoir spends ninety-one chapters making, and it makes it by refusing the very sentimentality that would soften its blow.

The book is a recovery narrative, but not the kind that flatters its audience with a clean arc from sickness to health. McCurdy structures it as a series of short, numbered, titled chapters, each built around a single scene or turning point rather than a balanced narrative of a period. The chapters move chronologically from her sixth birthday through her late twenties, and the formal choice does something specific: it traps the reader inside the child’s moment-by-moment experience, where the abuse is visible in every event but absent from the narrator’s interpretation. The adult McCurdy rarely editorializes from a present-tense vantage; instead, she lets the gap between what the child reports and what the reader perceives do the work of indictment. This gap is the book’s central literary device, and it is deployed with a discipline that makes the memoir more disturbing than any explicit condemnation could be. When seventeen-year-old Jennette tells her therapist Laura that her mother was “wonderful… the perfect mom,” the reader has already watched Debra teach her eleven-year-old daughter calorie restriction, conduct “breast and front butt exams” in the shower into her teens, confiscate gifts, police her body, and blame her for a cancer recurrence when a paparazzo catches her with a boyfriend. Laura’s eventual verdict — “She taught it to you. That’s abuse” — lands not as revelation but as the first time anyone in Jennette’s world has named what the reader has been watching for two hundred pages.

The memoir’s first half chronicles the audition circuit, the iCarly years, and the escalating damage at home. McCurdy’s mother channels her own “unlived ambitions” into a child-stardom project, and Jennette’s career becomes the family’s organizing principle. The details are granular and grim: the painful butterfly clips Mom uses to style her hair, the “Jell-O Jigglers” monologue for Academy Kids, the gas chamber scene on The X Files at age eight, the brutal desert shoot for Golden Dreams where she gets upgraded to principal because another child can’t stop smiling. Running alongside the professional grind is the private one: nightly weigh-ins and “calorie restriction” beginning at eleven, a doctor’s first use of the word “anorexia,” compulsive bathroom rituals she attributes to the “Holy Ghost,” and the family’s gradual slide out of the LDS church as show business consumes their Sundays. McCurdy renders her father as a near-mute presence, her three brothers flattened to labels — “the together one,” “the smart one,” “the sensitive one” — and this thinness of the supporting cast is a real limitation. The memoir’s world shrinks to a two-character psychodrama: Jennette and Mom, with everyone else a bystander. That focus gives the book its claustrophobic power but also leaves the reader wondering what might have been if anyone else in that household had been permitted an interior life.

When the iCarly offer arrives, the exploitation at home finds its institutional mirror. “The Creator” — McCurdy never names Dan Schneider in the text, though he is unmistakable — demands bikinis over her one-piece preference, orders her steak and whiskey-coffee, gives her a shoulder massage she endures, and promises her own spin-off contingent on total obedience: “listen to me and let me guide you.” The production compliments her thinning body, replaces her directing slate with “N/A,” and after the show ends offers a $300,000 “thank-you gift” that McCurdy immediately recognizes as hush money. “No, it’s not free money,” she writes. “This feels to me like hush money.” Her refusal of that payment, followed by the doubt that immediately follows it, captures the memoir’s moral center: this is a woman who has been trained her whole life to comply, and the act of saying no costs her something the reader can feel. Across the same chapters, her mother’s cancer returns, her first romantic and sexual experiences are shadowed by paparazzi and Debra’s furious “little SLUT” emails, and at an Emmy’s party a man named Liam rapes her while she is too drunk to consent. The memoir does not linger on that assault in the way trauma memoirs often do; it reports it with the same flat affect that characterizes much of the prose, a stylistic choice that can read as numbness or as a deliberate refusal to give the event more narrative energy than she chooses to.

The prose itself is functional rather than lyrical — short declarative sentences, heavy reliance on reported dialogue, occasional comedic asides that deflate without diminishing the trauma. McCurdy has a gift for the self-lacerating joke that lands precisely because it isn’t a joke at all. “A pushover is a bad thing to be, but an opinionated pushover is a worse thing to be,” she writes, after capitulating to an interior decorator’s $14,742 cheetah-print curtain plan she hates. “A pushover is nice and goes along with it, whatever it is. An opinionated pushover acts nice and goes along with it, but while quietly brooding and resentful. I am an opinionated pushover.” Passages like this show that her self-awareness has outrun her ability to act on it — and that gap is the recovery. The memoir’s best writing emerges when she is tracking the precise mechanics of her own compliance, the way a lifetime of managing her mother’s hysteria trained her to disown her own perceptions in real time.

When Debra finally dies in the hoarder-house living room in Garden Grove — the “Garbage Grove” house that was both the family prison and the site of Jennette’s earliest memories — the book’s center of gravity collapses. For her entire life, Jennette’s purpose was her mother’s survival. On her twenty-second birthday, at a bar surrounded by friends, she realizes she has no wish left to make: every birthday candle she ever blew out was for Mom to live another year. Without that organizing purpose, she plunges into bulimia, alcohol, and the codependent relationship with Steven, an assistant director she meets on a Toronto shoot. The bulimia chapters are the memoir’s most unsparing: the binge-purge cycles, the whiskey, the molar that dissolves mid-flight, the way she envies the “REALLY anorexic” because “that’s, like, way more disordered than what I do.” McCurdy’s refusal to aestheticize the eating disorder — to make it glamorous or tragic in the way eating-disorder narratives often do — is one of the book’s understated achievements. The disorder is boring, repetitive, and humiliating, and she renders it that way.

Recovery enters through a series of deliberate severings. A therapist named Laura, described as “boho-chic,” becomes the first person to name the calorie restriction as abuse, which sends Jennette fleeing back to purging. Later, Jeff, an “umless” eating-disorder specialist, introduces her to normalization plans, “risky foods,” and the “Don’t Let Slips Become Slides” framework that becomes her anchor. Jeff’s clinical language — worksheets, weigh-ins, the tracking of thoughts and feelings before and after meals — marks a tonal shift in the memoir, from the chaotic reportage of childhood to the deliberate, almost bureaucratic work of recovery. Some readers will find these sections didactic; the trade-off is that they demonstrate recovery as unglamorous labor rather than epiphany, and the memoir earns the shift by showing that labor fail and falter. On her twenty-sixth birthday at Disneyland, after months of Jeff’s program, she still purges in a Tortilla Joe’s stall, recalling his warning about purging artichoke dip at a future office Christmas party. “Recovery is still bumpy,” she admits, and the admission is what makes the self-account trustworthy. This is not a book that sells a cure.

The book’s climactic acts of reclamation are all rejections. She meets her biological father, Andrew, a jazz trombonist she learns about only after her mother’s death reveals that the man she called Dad was not her biological parent. She throws her scale down the trash chute on her twenty-fourth birthday. “I am 95 pounds. Or 105 pounds. Or 115 pounds. Or 125 pounds. Whatever the scale reads, I am that and only that,” she writes. “I no longer want that number to be the entirety of who I am.” She ends the relationship with Steven on a swan boat at Echo Park Lake, both of them recognizing that “fixing” each other was the only glue holding them together. She quits an eighteen-year acting career in a two-minute phone call. “I want my life to be in my hands,” she writes. “Not an eating disorder’s or a casting director’s or an agent’s or my mom’s. Mine.” And when the iCarly reboot comes with a generous financial offer, she declines, prioritizing her mental health over the money and the industry’s gravitational pull. Each of these acts is presented not as triumphant liberation but as the resolution of an approval-seeking compulsion her mother instilled, linking career and eating disorder as twin symptoms of the same foundational lie: that Jennette’s desires were never hers to have.

The grave scene that closes the book is its most explicit argument. Standing at her mother’s headstone, McCurdy refuses to romanticize the dead, rejects the pedestalized adjectives on the marker, and names the specific abuses: “She taught me an eating disorder when I was eleven years old — an eating disorder that robbed me of my joy and any amount of free-spiritedness that I had. She never told me my father was not my father.” But the refusal is not a clean break. She admits she still misses her mother and starts to cry, still catches herself fantasizing that Mom might have apologized so they could start fresh. “Why do we romanticize the dead?” she asks. “Why can’t we be honest about them? Especially moms. They’re the most romanticized of anyone. Moms are saints. Angels by merely existing.” The passage lands with force because McCurdy does not exempt herself from the critique. She is doing exactly the romanticizing she condemns, and she names that too. The book’s final image — walking away from the grave to the Doobie Brothers playing from a stranger’s stereo — is a refusal of closure, a concession that the grief and the disorder are managed, not gone.

The memoir sits at the intersection of several traditions, and its most distinctive contribution is the way it fuses them. It is a celebrity memoir that refuses the genre’s standard moves — no redemption arc, no gratitude for the fame, no warm anecdotes about beloved co-stars. It is a recovery narrative that treats recovery not as a destination but as a plateau, the eating disorder downgraded clinically to “a person who sometimes exhibits bulimic behavior” rather than cured. It is a feminist text in its insistence on de-romanticizing the mother figure, pushing back against a culture that canonizes dead moms as saints by mere virtue of having occupied the role. It is psychoanalytic in its therapeutic framework — Jeff’s normalization protocols, Laura’s naming of abuse, the language of codependency — but it foregrounds the patient’s resistance to those frameworks rather than their tidy application. And it is a child-stardom exposé that, unlike many entries in that subgenre, locates the primary exploitation not in the industry but in the family home — Nickelodeon is a second abuser, a system that mirrors and monetizes the dynamic Debra built. The cross-references are thick with television shows and pop-culture artifacts (iCarly, Sam & Cat, Malcolm in the Middle, Grey’s Anatomy, God’s Not Dead, the Doobie Brothers, Sara Bareilles) but they function less as nostalgia than as a map of the world that consumed her.

The memoir’s weaknesses are inseparable from its method. The single-witness account is rigorous and self-reflexive, but the supporting cast remains thin. Her father is rendered so blank that he approaches caricature; her brothers are labels rather than people; Debra’s interior life is almost entirely withheld, which makes the abuse feel mythic rather than fully human. There is no sense of what Debra wanted beyond her daughter’s career, no backstory that might complicate the portrait without excusing it. This is a strategic choice — the book is Jennette’s story, and she is under no obligation to give her abuser a fair hearing — but it limits the memoir’s dimensionality. The recovery chapters with Jeff risk didacticism, and the prose can flatten moments that call for more texture. Yet the memoir’s candor about its own limits — the acknowledgment that recovery is “still bumpy,” that the “eating-disorder brain” still dominates every meal, that she remains an “opinionated pushover” — neutralizes many of these objections. A book this honest about its narrator’s blind spots earns the right to its narrowness of focus.

What this book is for is not subtle. It is for anyone who has experienced a parent whose love was indistinguishable from control, who has been trained to perform consent while feeling none, who has been shamed for a body that was never allowed to be their own. It is for people who have lost someone they also needed to escape, and who have felt the guilt of relief at that escape. It is a corrective to a culture that canonizes dead mothers, and it does that work not by denying grief but by insisting that grief and honest reckoning can coexist. The title will offend people who need it to offend them, and that is part of the point. McCurdy has written a memoir that trusts its reader to hold two things at once: that her mother did terrible things, and that she still misses her mother and cries. The refusal to resolve that tension is the book’s integrity, and when she walks away from the grave to the sound of a stranger’s stereo, she is not offering closure. She is offering the harder thing: a life on her own terms, still messy, still incomplete, but finally hers.