Jennette McCurdy’s memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, isn’t a gossipy tell-all about her time starring in Nickelodeon’s iCarly. But it is a candid, painful, and sometimes darkly funny look back at the star-making machine: what it means to grow up in the public eye; how to make your self small to pay the bills; and the act required at home to keep it all going.
McCurdy’s recollection opens with the ceremonial unwrapping of a present for her sixth birthday. Even though little Jennette wants to rip it open, she knows it’s important to her mother to save every scrap of wrapping paper and is careful to make her mother happy. It sets the scene for the decades to come: suppressing her wants in order to meet her mother’s emotional and financial needs. Debra McCurdy wanted to be a star. Instead, she ended up as a Mormon housewife struggling with four kids and stage four breast cancer. Remission gave her a new lease on life, which she then devoted to her new dream: making Jennette a star. Six-year-old Jennette has no interest in monologues or dance classes (several different kinds) or pogo-stick jumping, but, well, doesn’t she want what Mommy wants and thinks is best? Of course, she does. And through years of tears, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive thoughts, exhaustion, anorexia, bulimia, and self-denial, she becomes the star of her mother’s dreams.
McCurdy takes us through the audition process and her struggles to please agents and directors, and there’s something really sad about her desperate wish to make others happy. She gets cast as an extra but is worried that her mother will find out that she missed out on being a principal actor. She spends her first day as an actor pretending to suffocate to death—which shows that she can cooperate and take direction, says her mom! She learns to cry on cue. She learns to suppress her doubts about getting cast because that would make her mother unhappy and because, by the time she’s a pre-teen, she’s the family breadwinner. But mostly it’s about keeping Mommy happy. Because Mommy could always get sick again.
It’s not a spoiler to say that yes, Debra McCurdy died. The book is divided into Before and After, and it’s in this after, in the wake of her mother’s death, that McCurdy starts to reckon with the pretending and people-pleasing that have been her survival strategy. There’s the end of iCarly. Bulimia. A troubled relationship. And therapy that asks her to unwrap and re-evaluate everything. McCurdy’s gift is her ability to convey how it all felt at the time, from childhood to stardom to the realization that her mother’s attention was abusive.
I’m Glad My Mom Died is not a gossipy book about fame; it’s about coming to understand and deal with the trauma behind it. It’s heartbreaking and human, self-aware, and sometimes very funny in spite of the subject matter. Recommended, and available from the Lebanon County Library System.
A Series of (Un)Fortunate Reviews 