Im Glad My Mom Died By Jennette McCurdy
I’m glad her mom died too. Im Glad My Mom Died really really hard to read but really insightful and well written. audiobook was particularly great. Im Glad My Mom Died more child celebrities should write books methinks Im Glad My Mom Died Jennette McCurdy writes a hard-hitting and propulsive memoir. I knew I’d be reading this the moment I came across the ballsy title/cover a few months ago, and am happy to report it did not disappoint. Well worth it if you grew up watching her on TV, or if you want to have a long think about the exploitation of child actors in Hollywood. Im Glad My Mom Died I feel weird giving someone's personal experience a rating so I'm leaving this un-rated, but please know that this was really something incredible. I absolutely recommend checking this one out if you're at all familiar with Jennette, but please do tread with caution if you're sensitive to discussions of eating disorders as this revolves pretty heavily around her struggles with disordered eating and bulimia.
CW: child abuse, narcissistic parents, disordered eating, fatphobia, terminal illness (breast cancer), hoarding, use of r-slur, depictions of ocd, depictions of bulimia/purging, gaslighting, emotional manipulation Im Glad My Mom Died
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this is a very candid account on the abuse jennette mccurdy suffered at the hands of her narcissistic mother, and how that merged with her experience as a child actress. i don’t think you need to be familiar with her show, or even know/care about her as a person to glean lots from this book, and i think it's an important text that could even be considered historical, due to her nature as a public figure and the way her story is likely representative of a much larger population of child actors.
for those hoping to get a “tea sesh” about the abuse rampant at nickelodeon, you won’t be getting that here, despite it being what the major media outlets are currently fixating on. jennette doesn’t shy away from talking about her experience with sam & cat (she hated it) and her experience with dan schnieder (terrible person, obviously, whom she never refers to by name), and even dedicates a short chapter to ariana grande, but this novel isn’t centered around that in the slightest, and to come into this book only for that would be a disservice to jennette's story.
reading about the abuse jennette experienced firsthand is completely heartbreaking. she writes about having an eating disorder, given to her by her mother, and feeling beholden to her mother at all times. from calling her ten times a day to insisting on showering her even as a teenager, this book is full of triggering content, and i would urge those who have experiences abuse to proceed with caution.
i think especially with gen z, we haven’t had a ton of actors from disney and nickelodeon speak out specifically about their experiences on set (the $300,000 offer from Nickelodeon jennette turned down may explain that) and how child acting impacted their lives, and it’s a very necessary perspective to hear as the consumers of that media. hearing some of the things jennette said about her stardom were jarring, in that as children we don’t really know what’s going on behind the scenes and mindlessly consume without regard to the actors lives. i also thought it was super interesting to get the perspective of a very self aware child star that didn’t become super successful on screen after their breakout role, and the narrative she builds around /why/ that was.
this book was super impactful, and i have no doubt will reach a large audience. mccurdy's writing style is succinct yet impactful, well organized, balanced with seriousness and humor, told in a very blunt tone. i would definitely recommend listening to the book via audiobook which is narrated by her because it adds a whole new layer of tone. this was a tough reading experience, but i really loved the book and would highly recommend to everyone. Im Glad My Mom Died As someone who’s never watched Nickelodeon or anything with this author, I was still highly engrossed in Jennette's story. You can tell she’s more passionate about writing than acting because her writing is of a higher caliber than other celebrity memoirs that were likely ghost-written. She describes events chronologically in such a detailed and engaging way, picking specific memories to demonstrate the dysfunction of her childhood. I appreciated her honesty, dry humor, and even her bitterness and negativity. Her train of thought is very similar to my own mentality (irritability, cynicism, being extremely critical of ourselves, etc) and having that mirrored back from another deeply wounded person was eye-opening. It makes me feel better knowing I'm not the only one who processes life this way... Can we do group therapy together, Jennette?!
While I appreciate the level of detail in recalling these events (no easy feat for those dealing with trauma), I would’ve loved to see more reflections of the themes across the book, like her present-day thoughts on her family, Hollywood, child stardom, body image, etc. As well as her learnings from therapy that she’s incorporating moving forward, just to give the rest of us more hope! Regardless, I look forward to seeing her future work and wish her nothing but happiness. Im Glad My Mom Died Jennette McCurdy is extremely talented in her writing and i hope she writes more in the future (whatever genre idc, i’ll read anything) because this book alone was a literary masterpiece.
it’s very fast pace. i appreciated how Jennette didn’t go into a ton of detail regarding certain subjects. it was just “yup this is was it is, this is how it is, and this is what i’m doing about it” it was very raw and real in my opinion. no flowery language
one thing i’ve seen a lot of people say about this book is “wow she’s so funny, her humor is great, ect.” which i don’t entirely understand since everything Jennette went through and described in this book was devastating. from the multiple forms of abuse, eating disorders, and having to grow up too fast….um where is the humor in that?! i did listen to the audiobook with this (which jennette also narrated) and there’s points in which you hear her actually crying.
nonetheless, i’m glad to see Jennette thriving in her writing career which she always wanted. i wish her nothing but the best for her. Im Glad My Mom Died praying that Jennette makes more from this book than Nickelodeon could’ve ever offered with their hush money
A truly incredible and hard-hitting memoir. Whether you watched Jennette’s shows growing up (like me) or you don’t know her at all, I think this book is a must read. I don’t want to go into too many details, so I’ll just share some of my thoughts:
• The writing is easy to read but still poignant. I think Jennette did a great job recounting the events of her life. I especially appreciate how she recounted her childhood; she really nailed writing from the perspective of a naïve child who doesn’t realize how awful her mother is.
• I love how truthful Jennette was about her own fuck-ups. She admitted she was very aware of how bitter and rude she had become, and how ungrateful she seemed (obviously, I think she was justified).
• I particularly loved the section about Jennette’s time on “Sam & Cat”. It showed how much her addiction, mental illnesses and eating disorders affected her work; how much Nickelodeon mistreated her, especially when compared to Ariana Grande; and how resentful she had grown over the years.
• The exploitation of children in the entertainment industry is something that really needs to be discussed. Seeing a child star expose the abuse she suffered in the industry is truly heartbreaking, but extremely important, especially in this day and age, where even more parents are pressuring their children and forcing them to put themselves out there for fame. I wonder if in 10 years we’ll see similar testimonies from kids of family channels who grew up making money for their parents in an even more disgusting way: by having they entire lives documented and posted online for all to see.
• Jennette’s friendship with Miranda was so wholesome <3
• A bit of a critique: I feel like certain events were skipped and only mentioned later in the timeline (for example: we never see her audition for iCarly, or how filming the 1st episode was, suddenly it was already 3 years into the filming of the show, out of nowhere we find out that she’d been to multiple events and red carpets, she randomly mentions she knows she has OCD and EDs – I guess she learned and came to terms with it off-page…). Obviously, this is a memoir, so the author knows better than me what was important to document, but still, some of these things seemed kind of crucial in my opinion (especially her learning about her disorders).
• The main reasons I’m giving it 4 stars is because memoirs are not really my thing, so I ended up not enjoying this as much as the other books I give 5 stars to; and because, as I mentioned, I think some things could’ve been a bit better. But, again, I still loved this book and highly recommend it to everyone!
(review written on 24/08/2022)
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this title is BRUTAL 💀
i'm so happy for her 😌 can't wait to read it!!
(06/04/2022) Im Glad My Mom Died
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So in my pre-review of this book, where I lamented about not being able to find a copy anywhere because of all the HYPE (seriously, I could not find a copy of this anywhere and the library had, like, a five-hundred year wait-- thank GOD for my sister sending me a copy as payment for watching her kitten), I said that the people giving this author shit about her choice of title were dickheads. Some people got mad at me about that, but I stand by what I said. Even more so after reading this memoir. I am seriously side-eyeing the people defending the mother, actually, because based on the accounts in this memoir, she was verbally, emotionally, physically, and sexually abusive. Not only that, but she coached her daughter into an eating disorder at age eleven and then managed her to ensure that she continued to starve herself. That's not to mention the stage-parenting, the freak-outs (especially while driving), and the fact that she wiped Jennette when she went to the bathroom well into, like, her preteens (imagine not even trusting your eleven-year-old daughter to wipe her own ass) and showered her into her late teens (sometimes with her older brother and also while giving her breast and vaginal exams, ostensibly to search for cancer, I guess).
What the FUCK.
Here's a hard truth. Some people are shitty people. Some of those shitty people are shitty parents. Being a parent does not give you a free-pass from all wrongs. Especially if you're just doing the whole parenting thing for a little human-sized accessory that you can live all of your failed dreams through. By the end of this book, I was kind of glad Jennette's mother died, too. After living under that kind of suffocating parenting, with gaslighting and serious emotional trauma, not to mention abuse, I would be fucking done. I don't blame Jennette for her feelings. And I love my mother. I'm lucky enough to have a pretty good relationship with her. And a few years ago, my mother got breast cancer, just like the author's mom, and I was so devastated that I felt like I was working in a total fog. I stepped back from social media and it was all I could do to focus on my day job because I was so upset. But I know that other people's experiences aren't like that, and we don't get to dictate how other people mourn (or choose not to). My mother ended up okay, but I would have been really sad if the worst happened, and that's because she was a good mom and she still works hard at being a good person. People who don't try to be good people are owed nothing. Why enshrine the dead if they leave behind a legacy of trash? The title is shocking but only because we tend to airbrush the pasts of the departed.
I'M GLAD MY MOM DIED rejects this premise. In this memoir, Jennette McCurdy lays out her upbringing in painfully explicit detail, starting from her mother's hoarding and growing up in poverty in a house that sounded like it should have been condemned, to the way her mother forced her into acting and she ended up being the golden goose that kept her family afloat after years of living hand to mouth. She talks about the way her mother emotionally manipulated her, and her guilt. She talks about how she started to get body dysmorphia because she felt like the only way she could continue to be successful was to look like a child forever, and when she expressed this fear to her mom, her mom taught her how to starve herself, starting an eating disorder that would basically rule her emotional breaks and her relationship with food for over a decade. She talks about her hatred of acting, what it was like working under the man she calls The Creator at Nickelodeon (we know who), her friendship with Miranda, and her jealousy and resentment of Ariana. And then she writes about her utterly conflicting feelings when her mother began to die of another bout of cancer, still manipulating her emotions.
This book stressed me out so much. I think it would be very triggering for people with eating disorders and people with abusive parents, as it is SO descriptive when it comes to these passages. It's also a brand new look into celebrity, because most celebrity memoirs are written by people who are still in the business, but this is kind of a fuck-you memoir written by someone who doesn't care if their bridges are burned, so she really unhauls all the dirt in a way that someone who probably wanted to keep working in this field wouldn't. It's really well-written but the writing can, at times, feel a bit amateurish. McCurdy has a lot of raw talent but the people hyping her up as brilliant are exaggerating a little.
ALSO, who the fuck is calling this book a hilarious memoir? Are these the same people who were talking about how funny CRYING IN H MART was? Is this where we open up the floor to a conversation about how women's emotional pain and fraught relationships are often mined for comedic value? Why do people find it so amusing when women hate their mothers? My review is already getting longer than I intended it to, but this is definitely a trend I've noticed lately where I'll pick up a memoir that's supposed to be funny and instead it's just an emotionally wrenching book about a woman dealing with her trauma. Ha-ha, I guess. Fuck that.
Do read this book, if you are in a healthy mental space, but gird yourself against the hype. It is not Jesus's Second Coming. It is just a very brave story about a woman trying to come clean with herself and the past.
4 stars
A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor—including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother—and how she retook control of her life.
Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,” eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?” She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.
In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly, she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!”), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.
Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair. Im Glad My Mom Died