In Jennette McCurdy's memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died – about surviving emotional and sexual child abuse by a narcissistic parent – the author recalls sitting by her mother’s death bed and thinking, “My life purpose has always been to make Mom happy, to be who she wants me to be. So without Mom, who am I supposed to be now?”
I’ve been estranged from my mother for almost eight years now — a third of my life. In the early years of the estrangement, I remember describing what it felt like as “having no origin, no beginning.” In losing my mother, I had lost all sense of myself. I was infinite and empty at the same time, free from her and tethered to nothing.
My relationship with my mother wasn’t always so clearly toxic. It escalated in the way water slowly rages itself into a boil, and the frog sitting there is still reminiscing about the days when the water was warm and welcoming. In the first section of her book, McCurdy paints a vivid picture of how a young child views an abusive parent — still through the lens of pure love. “Oh, Mom. She’s so beautiful,” a six-year-old McCurdy thinks in wonder. In another scene, after her mother tells her that she’s her best friend, young McCurdy thinks, “This is my purpose… to be the closest person in the world to her. I feel whole.”
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McCurdy, who previously starred in several wildly popular Nickelodeon teen shows like iCarly and Sam & Cat, details how her mother forced her into child acting to fulfil her own deferred dream of being a star, how Jennette’s desire to please her mother and inability to say no to her abuser led to years of her stuck in a career that actively deteriorated her mental health. The memoir is also a heart-wrenching but honest account of living with an eating disorder; Jennette’s mother taught her “calorie restriction” at age eleven, leading to her early struggles with anorexia, then binging, then bulimia. As a narcissist, McCurdy’s mother viewed this starvation as part of the connective tissue that formed their bond.
When your parent has narcissistic traits, you’re often pulled further than the love a child has for their mother because they make you their sole source of companionship and emotional support. I remember how often my mother, who homeschooled me on and off when she wanted purpose in her life, would insist to me and others that she was my “best friend.”
“Mom’s watching me and I’m watching her and that’s how it always is. We’re always connected. Intertwined. One,” McCurdy recalls. When I read that line, I recall something too. Standing in my mother’s foyer, after finally calling her evil and abusive. Her in my face, screaming, “If I’m evil, so are you b[****}. Everything you are, I made you.” It has taken eight years of therapy to try to begin to convince myself that my mother and I are not intertwined; we are not one. Even miles and years apart, sometimes I can still feel her — what she’s thinking, what she’s doing.
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One of the most powerful — but under-discussed, especially amidst social media reactions to a small portion of the book discussing Jennette McCurdy’s working relationship with pop star Ariana Grande — aspects of the book is her relationship with writing. She details an incident when she was eleven and wrote a screenplay, realising that she unequivocally preferred writing to acting.
“Through writing, I feel power for maybe the first time in my life,” McCurdy writes. “I don’t have to say somebody else’s word. I can write my own. I can be myself for once.” But it’s another dream dashed by her mother, who manipulates her into sticking with acting and giving up writing, saying, “Writers dress frumpy and get fat.”
But now, years after her mother’s death and years after McCurdy’s exit from acting, writing has been a core part of discovering her identity and forging a new path that’s her own. She’s written and directed three short films: Strong Independent Woman, about a mother that helps her daughter recover from an eating disorder; Kenny, about a thirty-something-year-old man dedicating his life to caring for his mother; and The McCurdys, based on McCurdy’s own dysfunctional upbringing. McCurdy’s voice is out there, not the words of Nickelodeon writing rooms or the voice of her mother, but a voice that is authentically hers, honing with each new project.
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I’m Glad My Mom Died started off as a one-woman show of the same name, written and performed by McCurdy. And now, it’s a bestselling book — sold out in stores and online, with people finding themselves 7th, 10th in line at their local libraries. McCurdy told Good Morning America that writing the book helped her heal and reframe her relationship with her mother. And, she stresses, the book wouldn’t exist if her mother was still alive because her “identity would have still been dictated by her.”
When I became estranged from my mother, it took years for me to regain any semblance of identity. In many ways, I’ve had to build myself from scratch. My mother isn’t dead, but the same result has been achieved. I escaped, and something and someone had to die for me to live. For McCurdy, her mother died. For me, it was just I who died, an old version of myself.
I’m Glad My Mom Died is a revelatory memoir by a dynamic young artist who is using her pain and experiences to forge a new identity. It’s also a book that speaks to countless victims of child abuse, including myself, giving us language to describe our experiences and further validation of those complicated feelings.
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