A daily review of books worth your time
More like this
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Jennette McCurdy's memoir takes its deliberately shocking title seriously and earns it. The former child star traces a childhood organized entirely around her mother's ambitions and control, and the strange, complicated liberation of grieving someone who hurt you. It's far funnier and braver than you'd expect.
The Review
McCurdy was a working actor before she was old enough to decide she wanted to be one. Her mother, Debra, wanted fame for her daughter with a hunger that shaped every part of their lives, and the memoir lays out, scene by scene, what that ambition cost. The acting auditions, the rationed calories, the way a parent's love arrived bundled with surveillance and need until the two became impossible to separate. What's remarkable is how McCurdy renders this from inside the child's perspective, where the controlling mother is also the adored one, and the abuse registers as devotion long before she has the language to call it anything else.
The writing is sharp and surprisingly comic, which is the book's real achievement. McCurdy has an unsentimental eye and a stand-up's timing, and she uses humor not to soften the material but to tell the truth about it at an angle that a straight-faced account couldn't reach. The chapters on her eating disorder, taught to her by her mother as a method of staying small and castable, are some of the most clear-eyed writing on the subject I've encountered, precisely because she refuses to dramatize. She just shows you the logic of it, how it made sense from the inside, which is far more disturbing than any speech about the dangers would be.
The title isn't provocation for its own sake. The book is structured around the death and what it unlocks, and McCurdy is honest that her mother's passing was the thing that finally let her begin to heal, to disentangle her own wants from the ones installed in her, to question whether she ever wanted to act at all. That's a genuinely hard thing to admit on the page, and she does it without self-pity and without asking the reader to either condemn or absolve. She simply reports what it was and what it took to survive it, including the years of bulimia, bad relationships, and therapy that came after the cameras stopped.
For a celebrity memoir, it's strikingly unconcerned with celebrity. The years on a hit kids' network are present but never the point; McCurdy is far more interested in the family kitchen than the soundstage, and readers hoping for industry dish should know that's not the book this is. What it offers instead is a portrait of how abuse can wear the face of love, and how long it takes to tell them apart. It's a quick, propulsive read, frequently laugh-out-loud funny, that keeps catching you off guard with how much it hurts underneath. The combination is rare. McCurdy has written the kind of memoir that uses a famous life to say something true and useful about an ordinary, secret kind of damage, and she's done it with more nerve than most writers twice her age.
Reviewed by Ellis
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.