JENNETTE MCCURDY I’m Glad My Mom Died. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart

Jennette McCurdy was a child star, but behind the scenes her mother’s ambition manifested in control and abuse.

It would be apt to describe Jennette McCurdy’s memoir about growing up as a child star in Los Angeles as a rollercoaster because Disneyland features often. Her grandfather worked in Tickets, and dropping in with friends to ride Space Mountain or the Matterhorn was as casual as a game of backyard cricket. I’m Glad My Mom Died is a funny, clever book about trauma and the contortion, pain and reward that accompanies abuse by a carer.

 When she was 14, McCurdy was booked for the role as Sam Puckett in the television series iCarly, which cemented her star status, though she had been appearing in film and TV from the age of six. When she becomes so famous that she is recognised everywhere, she notes drily,

I no longer go to Disneyland, my favourite place, because last time I tried, I was walking down Main Street and so many people came up to me that they had to stop the Christmas Fantasy Parade midway through. Goofy looked pissed.

McCurdy’s co-dependent relationship with her mother is shocking. Her mother inserted herself into every aspect of her daughter’s life, and those of her brothers, though to a lesser extent. The abuse, couched in terms of love and sacrifice, stole her childhood and bequeathed alcoholism and a tormented relationship with food: anorexia in childhood was followed by years of bulimia, where she would purge up to five times a day. The book opens with her mother in a coma, near death, and she and her brothers are imparting final messages. McCurdy waits until everyone leaves the room, then leans in close and whispers that she’s down to 89 pounds (40 kilos). She’s convinced that will wake up her mother. She is so proud.

The family is poor and her mother’s fixation on Jennette becoming a child star is a ticket to freedom, a better life than she had. She also has breast cancer, stage four, which she wields to control the family, insisting on a weekly family viewing of a home video showing her receiving the diagnosis. Telling the story of being a cancer survivor is her favourite thing. The very air in the house is like a ‘held breath’, and her daughter’s guilt and fear of the cancer returning supplant any thoughts of her own bodily safety. She and her brothers are all home-schooled, so there is no respite.

It is a long and heartbreaking journey from justifying her mother’s actions to recognising them as abuse. McCurdy has dance and acting classes, as well as a constant stream of appointments with agents and casting directors. She auditioned with raging fevers, her mother making her ‘chug Gatorade’ and dosing her up with Tylenol. Reciting the many violences inflicted, the ‘ows’ that result, McCurdy describes how her little girl’s body was plucked, shaved, and moulded, her hair curled, coloured, her eyelashes tinted, teeth whitened.

‘I hear Mom’s footsteps as she approaches the bathroom. I’m off to Fantasyland.’ Disneyland is where she goes in her head when her mother showers her and her brothers throughout their teen years, sometimes together. She gives Jennette a daily breast and ‘“front butt” exam, which is what she calls my private parts’. McCurdy’s voice is clear, childlike and desperately sad. ‘She doesn’t mean to make me uncomfortable, I don’t think. She says she has to shower me because I wouldn’t know how to shampoo and condition my own hair.’ When one of her brothers asked if he could shower himself, his mother sobbed and said she didn’t want him to grow up. He never asked again.

Jennette’s small size has always allowed her to play roles for younger kids, and while some people notice things are not normal, no one intervenes. Not ‘The Creator’, the big-name producer of iCarly whose manipulative, toxic behaviour she eventually calls out – after lawyering-up – nor the doctor who comments on her thinness when she drops three children’s dress sizes, and tells her mother to watch her eating. This bemuses her: ‘watching her eating’ is exactly what her mother does, doling out calorie-controlled meals and constantly weighing her. This is encouragement. Support.

Her grandfather sees her OCD in checking off items, reciting mantras to herself, and the never-ending learning of lines, and he tells her that kids should have ‘fun’. But ‘fun’ is not something she is familiar with. She drops the toy he gives her into her pocket and goes back to practising her Russian accent. Her mother tells anyone who will listen that acting is Jennette’s favourite thing in the world.

The constant performing for her mother is the saddest artifice of all. She hides her pain while her mother is tying her hair into rows with ‘scalp-gripping little clips’ with an ‘Okay, Mommy’, and swinging her legs: ‘The leg swing is a nice touch. Selling it.’

McCurdy has written a devastating picture of a child’s confusion when love and trust is betrayed, and of the toll exacted as an adult in reconciling this. Structured in two equal parts, Before and After, her light touch and short chapters make compelling reading. The laugh-out-loud moments are frequent: at a particular low point, she hears rival and former co-star Ariana Grande’s latest hit, ‘Focus on Me’, come on in her Uber. It must be a sign.

Jennette McCurdy I’m Glad My Mom Died Simon and Schuster 2023 PB 320pp $34.99

Jessica Stewart is a freelance writer and editor. She can be found at www.yourseconddraft.com where she writes about editing, vagaries of the English language and books she’s loved.

You can buy I’m Glad My Mom Died from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: actors, child abuse, child stars, Disneyland, Hollywood, iCarly, Jennette | McCurdy, Los Angeles, memoir, television stars