Half His Life by Jennette McCurdy – Follow I’m Glad My Mother’s Dead | imaginary

WWhen it was published in 2022, Jennette McCurdy’s memoir lit a touch paper for an emerging cultural conversation. I’m glad it was my mother who died that introduced her mother Debra’s narcissistic personality disorder to a world eager to discuss parental separation from adult children. McCurdy also suffered sexual abuse, and claimed her mother contributed to her developing an eating disorder. The memoir was a bestseller, guiding readers through the realities of generational trauma. A change of pace for the former Disney child star who was the “funny star” of obnoxious Nickelodeon kids shows.

In her first work of fiction, Half a Life, McCurdy continues to open Pandora’s box, highlighting the blurred boundaries between parent and child and the loss of identity due to over-entanglement, with powerful statements that seem like they’re straight out of a sitcom writers’ room.

The main character, Waldo, is a high school student whose life doesn’t seem to be her own. She plays herself out through sexual encounters and breaks up at the school disco (“I stand on the side watching, surrounded by a blanket of catatonia”). We soon discover that these reactions have been passed down from her chaotic mother. McCurdy writes “Mother” as a major comic character, the damage she inflicts on her child seeping out throughout the novel as if from invisible bullet wounds. Their relationship shifts uncomfortably between friends, siblings and caregivers (“I’ve been controlling my mother’s emotions since I was five”). Waldo remembers her mother giving her advice on seduction when she was five years old (“The best way to keep a man is to be as pretty as possible”), with advice from trade school: to basically transform into the person your man wants you to be.

In scene after scene we see Waldo returning to her empty house, her only company a sea of ​​brightly colored notes and instructions on how to reheat her next unsatisfying TV dinner. She copes with an online shopping addiction (“Tab tab tab tab. Shopping cart. Shopping cart. Desperate to expel this heavy void”) where household items, fast food, and pointless fast fashion purchases become shorthand for the emotional wasteland in which she feels trapped.

Waldo runs wild, and gets caught up in the pursuit of her married English teacher, Mr. Corgi. McCurdy’s writing here is ornate: Waldo’s observations are often brutal but full of humanity. Korgy is a complex villain: a failed author turned teacher who grew up in World of Warcraft, loves Matchbox Twenty songs and is trapped in his own life. We wade uncomfortably into the deep end of their unequal dynamic, from father and daughter to Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. McCurdy writes happily of Waldo’s lust/loathing as she imagines licking his hairy belly, and the desperate car-crash energy buzzing between them. Maybe this is an alternative to her addiction to shopping and fast food – or maybe she’s just bored.

The obsession becomes overwhelmingly tragic and mundane. The scenes of intimacy are a masterclass, as McCurdy links Waldo’s masochism with the illusion of control in a deeply unequal power dynamic. When their relationship crumbles in the harsh light of reality, McCurdy returns for a final sex scene, which effortlessly transitions from body horror to French farce. Half His Life is a bleak, exhilarating, and often uncomfortable triumph, one that underscores McCurdy’s talent for focusing on the multi-layered nature of trauma and deftly deconstructing them, one by one.