Review: I'm Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy
by
Stuart Holland
There have been rave reviews for this memoir this year and I can see why. Jennette manages to tell a harrowing and very sad story in a way that’s punchy and funny. She reads the audiobook herself and hearing the story in her own voice, that I know from seeing her on TV all those years ago, hits hard.
I was a big fan of iCarly, and Sam (Jennette’s character) was actually my favorite. It sucks to know now that that life wasn’t one she wanted and that she went through so much trauma while living it. I am glad that her and Miranda Cosgrove’s friendship was a real one, that it was a positive space in a storm of terrible.
The story follows Jennette’s early life as a child star and how her mother’s manipulative control over her life was, unknown to her at the time, abusive and lining up a host of lifelong issues she’d have to grapple with as an adult. Her mom is actually alive for a lot of the runtime of the book. Throughout, her mother’s actions are, to the reader, quite transparently malicious, in a twisted self-serving way. But quite reasonably, to the child Jennette, that’s not obvious, and the tragedy of that comes through as you listen.
Jennette has clearly had a difficult life, despite the fame and fortune (and often because of it). I’m glad to know that she’s doing better now, but she says herself that she’s not “cured”, just improved. And toward the end, when wrapping up about what could have been had her mother survived, she reflects that really that manipulation and abuse would’ve continued. We, as a society, lionize the dead. Sometimes we mean well. But really, some people are just deeply flawed and that doesn’t change when they die. We do a disservice to the living when denying that.
