I'm Glad My Mom Died

First things first, as all essay-writing workshops tell you, open with an attention-getter. That title gets all the attention. McCurdy appears on the cover in a chic pink outfit underneath a Jacqueline Susann-style typeface shrugging as she holds a Pepto-Bismol pink funerary urn. The buzz on this book was intense and throughout the Summer and Fall I saw it everywhere about town. Having read it, it’s very, very funny. It’s very well written, and it is terribly sad.

McCurdy tells the story of growing up in one of the poorer villages of Orange County, CA surrounded by the comfortable California dream trappings of Disneyland and the beach while her family struggled squarely lower-working-class.

Her mother had survived a bout with cancer when she was a baby, and the specter of its return hung over her entire childhood. Indeed, it is what killed her mother some 20-odd years later. But in the time between Jennette’s birth and her mother’s death, her Mother weaponized guilt and her cancer battle to manipulate the household into servicing her narcissistic delusion-world and throwing everything they had into her bottomless emotional void-pit of need. To get the compliance, to get the emotional support she needed, Mom ran the household like an authoritarian and inflicted some very, very dark psychology on the house: screaming tantrums, tears, trash-talking the non-compliant, praising golden children (the ones doing what she wanted), gaslighting, hoarding, bodily autonomy invasion, a dash of religious keeping-up-with-the-Joneses (Mormonism) performativity, etc.

And Jennette, an emotionally intuitive, impressionable and loving child, an enabler because she was a child, went along for the ride giving up her autonomy, her choices, her very identity to her mom because that’s what good children do, right? Honor thy mother and father and all?

The book is divided into halves: before the mother’s death and after. I’ll endeavor to be delicate, but the first half starts fun and very funny. The anecdotes are not-to-be-believed. But as hit after hit of what-the-fuckery keeps coming, you realize that these were actual lives, and that you’ve been doing emotional-disaster rubbernecking. And then it’s not fun anymore. It’s still funny, because McCurdy writes it that way, but you realize you’ve been reading an absolute tragedy. But perhaps we need to own the truth that traumas can be funny. McCurdy tells the tragicomic history well and sticks the punchlines.

The vignettes of the book’s first half provide the background I’ve summarized already, but also start to bring in McCurdy’s acting success. We’re told the story of (my unlicensed take) a narcissist who wanted a dream of validation-by-fame for herself and, unable to get it, pushed her inappropriately co-identified extension, her daughter, into the limelight to get it for her. The mom pushed her child along until she…the kid, not the mom…became one of the “it” kid actor celebrities of the early 2000’s.

I, personally, missed McCurdy’s era of television, but I had some dim awareness of “Nick” (no longer Nickelodeon) and Disney factory shows existing. Jennette was a primary actor on two of Nick’s (iCarly and Sam & Cat) shows. I never saw an episode of either, but I checked out some YouTube clips after reading the book. It was kiddie sit-coms: friends sticking up for each other, romantic tension, laugh tracks, pratfalls and a sock full of butter. It wasn’t good material, but she was good in it.

Other horrors: Along the way, there is an inappropriately abusive and flirty creator. The house is so full of Mom’s hoarded material that the kids sleep on mats in the living room. There is a father chased out of the house at knifepoint for some imagined slight. There is a father so ground down by constant demeaning that he was willing to sleep in the car for some peace. There is a constant weekly ritual of watching VHS video of cancer-riddled Mom near death in the hospital so that everyone in the here and now does whatever she demands – no matter how unreasonable. There is a 16 year old girl who has still never showered herself, alone, because her mother insisted on doing it. And there is the adorable little “gals thing” of mom introducing Jennette to calorie restriction.

By the halfway point I was about at my limit.

But time marches on, and fame and a bit of money help Jennette start individuating. This creates some iciness between her and her family, especially her mother and maternal grandmother. This iciness turns to deep freeze when she’s caught by paparazzi cavorting with a boy (she’s in her 20’s) and receives dozens of emails and texts calling her a filthy whore (oh, and by the way, buy us a new refrigerator). We’re aware that a showdown is looming and things will be said, actions will be taken, ties will be cut.

And then her mother dies. That damage will not be identified and screamed about. Instead, it will simply be historical fact.

The second half of the book is the therapy, the grief, the drinking, the bad relationships, the detox, the learning to eat again that is the path back from the Hell Jennette found herself in – a Hell she never chose to walk into – and that part of the book is neither fun nor funny (usually).

And so on one fine day, understanding the scope of betrayal (“Oh, and by the way, your dad isn’t your dad”) and manipulation of her mother, Jennette goes to the plot where her mother’s earthly remains rest. She says goodbye. “I know I’m not coming back.”

As far as deeply disturbing memoirs go, it is well written. And I know Jennette will, especially given the book’s success, be given chances to share her writing gift again. I admire her bravery and vulnerability, but no one should have gone through this.

And I guess that’s all there is to say.