A Debut That Came Out Swinging

A Review of "I'm Glad My Mom Died" by Jennette McCurdy

I listened to the audiobook version, available on Spotify.

STAR RATING: ✰✰✰✰✰
Review contains spoilers.

I’m late to this party, and I’m at a loss for words--for several reasons.

Jennette McCurdy’s debut comes out swinging and establishes her as a master-class author. She weaves humor into the chaos and abuse of her childhood to makes things lighter without taking away the severity of everything. Still, there were times my mouth dropped and I paused the audiobook to sit with what I’d just heard.

Jennette's mother was, as she repeatedly says in her interviews, a very complicated woman. She was disturbed but not entirely evil, and yet I can’t fathom doing the things she did to a child. She leaned on Jennette emotionally from a very young age, isolated her from her peers, taught her ‘calorie restriction’ (which set up decades of anorexia and bulimia), forced her into a career she hated, and shut down her dreams of writing among many other horrific things. Atop it all, she demanded love and even adoration from Jennette. Jennette’s mother wanted to be pitied, revered, and respected all at once. So yes, she was a complicated woman.

One thing I haven’t seen talked about nearly enough is the part religion played in all of this. Jennette grew up Mormon, and even though she stopped attending church when her acting career took off, her mother never abandoned her strict religious ideals. She was a headstrong-holier-than-thou-hypocrite who believed sins were okay as long as she was the one committing them. She berated and insulted Jennette for having a boyfriend as an adult, calling her a slut and a whore, only for it to be revealed in the final chapters she’d been having an affair on Jennette’s father for decades. The religious morality instilled by her mother (who didn’t practice what she preached) affected her sense of self and her sexuality. She felt disgusted when she grew breasts, thinking it made her a sexual being, and didn’t know what sperm was until she was giving a blowjob to a much older man. Though McCurdy doesn’t touch on religion too much throughout the book, as someone raised under a similarly strict religion, I felt hit especially hard by those passages. McCurdy perfectly portrays the same things I felt growing up through witty commentary, inner monologues, and uncomfortable sexual encounters.

McCurdy struggled with conflicting feelings during the passing of her mother. Her family had known of her mother’s battle with cancer, and when things started to look bleak, Mama McCurdy demanded the adoration she always did tenfold. She wanted Jennette to visit her grave as often as she could and weep. Even in death, she demanded things from others. Jennette describes the feeling of relief combined with a deep emptiness. Who was she without her mother? The woman who had been her best friend, manager, and roommate? She describes visiting her mother’s grave for the last time in a bittersweet chapter. She knew she wouldn’t return, no matter how much her mom wished it. I remember listening in my bedroom and feeling elated, like she’d finally stuck it to her mother. I think of it now with a solemn clarity. She was free without her, but she’d still lost her. And that, my friend, is the entire theme of the book masterfully portrayed by McCurdy in a single scene.

The book finished without the happy and satisfying conclusion I normally find in the fiction I read, but this isn’t fiction. Part of me wanted the final note to be about how happy, successful, and healed she’d become now. I wanted her to tell us she’d fought and won against her eating disorders, found love within herself, found romance, and reconnected with the members of her family. Instead, I was met with the reality of life. With the rug swept from under her, all Jennette could do was stand back up again, dust herself off, and keep going. 

That’s all any of us can do, really.

With that, I give the book five stars.