I Read Jennette McCurdy’s ‘I’m Glad My Mom Died’.

This book was[/is?] a phenomenon. I couldn’t get away from it last year, not even from an advertising perspective, but from a place where friends and online Personalities I followed were all over it. I saw it on bookshelves, I saw it in IG ads, I saw snark and joy about it from Twitter posts. Jennette McCurdy wrote a book that slammed her mother and slammed herself and people wanted to eat it up in a way that I don’t think could have come at a better time for her. iCarly was a show that people knew about it, and not only knew about, but in some sectors of the populace loved, and the character Sam went on to be on a show with the ubiquitous and enormously loved Ariana Grande plus Dan Schneider, creepazoid numero uno, was being lit up for his pedophiliac tendencies. Jennette’s book wasn’t written with all of these things in mind. It genuinely feels like the timing just worked out perfectly, landing itself a picture perfect release period where all of these branching paths landed on the perfect rift in a timeline where we wanted some tea on it. The cover is wonderful. The title is even better. And I’d even wager that her level of fame is also that perfect and airtight bubble where she isn’t too famous where people believed she would have to sugar coat things to stay relevant, but also isn’t too unknown that she would have to have this book to garner attention. All things lined up perfectly for this book to happen.

This book is extraordinarily honest. It’s not unlike many memoirs, especially those that deal with mental illness, eating disorders and/or controlling parents. It doesn’t preach, it doesn’t feel like the book was necessitated as part of a recovery program, it doesn’t pretend to be an expert or guidebook on any particular subject. What it does do with its honesty is tell you how it felt through Jennette’s eyes to be Jennette/Sam/Debra’s Daughter. It feels authentic in a way that doesn’t hold back on self-deprecation and even in the slight shade thrown at Ariana Grande, it almost feels like it’s being written from a place of personal opinion as opposed to justification of certain feelings. We see her talk about the unglamorous lifestyle of someone trying to vomit their way into someone they [used to] want to be. She speaks plainly about shitty love, about boredom in relationships, about banal showbiz life. What I’m most impressed about is that she does not intend to take anyone down throughout this entire book. There’s an ownership to a lot of the opinions she has, and I think that’s my favorite part of the way this book was written. It doesn’t intend to put her above (or below) anything or anyone else. It owns the idea that this is perception.

I think the way this book is written also supports that stance as well. At times it feels a little journally, at others it feels like a direct memoir. It never larks into blogger territory where it feels scathing or judgmental. It feels like she would sit down and write a chapter whenever she knew she wanted to address a moment, a symptom, a costar, a period of her life, and write it without editing, getting it all down on the page in a bite sized chunk. I think she took all of these chunks and organized them chronologically, then had them edited, then refined them. The book never reads too long in any chapter, never gets you to a place where you think you might need to put it down. I think it’s such an easy read that you could either take it down in one sitting or microdose it on lunch breaks and never feel lost. I wouldn’t say the language was “simple”, but certainly conversational. For the subject matter at hand, we get just enough darkness, just enough helplessness, just enough desperation. It’s never overwrought.

I think that being said, my biggest criticism is the fact that the book is a total bummer! I know that’s kind of a bonehead, simpleton thing to say, considering that we know where this book was meant to take us. But chapter after chapter, it’s like a massive sledgehammer is taken to our heart, from the things that were taken from us, the apathy that she started to feel about her disease, the disappointment about her mother. Abuse after abuse after letdown after spiral, every chapter lands with the sound of a Cold War hammer on an Industrial Revolution anvil, clang/clang/clang, just beating us up with low-vibe punishment. That’s not to say that I don’t respect the battle she’s undergone, or continues to undergo. But I also don’t think I got to know Jennette more than her struggles. I didn’t come out of it knowing anything about her other than she dealt with a lot of the worst elements of Pageant Moms, of Child Acting, of Showbiz, of Keeping Up Appearances. I don’t think she ever really portrayed herself as a human beyond those things, and while all of her experiences represent very human and authentic, I don’t think I knew who these things were happening to. As much as it misses the point of much of her haranguing around the subject, I only was ever really able to think of it as happening to Sam From iCarly, a show I never watched, but saw plenty of commercials for. It doesn’t lack some impact, but it lacks the resonance of knowing the person to which these things are occurring. I wish I knew more about the person this happened to.

I think if you have any interest in reading this book already, I’d recommend jumping into it! It won’t take you much time at all, and I think if you have similar expectations that I had going in (heavy on the nightmare mom, moderate on the struggling with an eating disorder) it will check those boxes for sure. I don’t know if this is a must read for anyone who didn’t already have it on the list, even peripherally. Love how fast of a read this was, and of course on some level, happy to be in on one of the more popular books of the last few years!