It’s rare and extraordinary when we experience moments of feeling seen, truly seen. Those moments are time-stopping, weight-lifting connections, in which we realize: “Holy shit, I am not alone.”
Amid hours of experiencing a mixture of pure captivation, free-falling tears and complex inspiration, I felt nakedly connected to Jennette McCurdy’s Aug. 9 memoir “I’m Glad My Mom Died.”
That was a surreal sensation given McCurdy was a star child of the TV network Nickelodeon for nearly 13 years. I was routinely watching her portray Sam Puckett in the TV shows “iCarly” and “Sam & Cat,” like millions of other kids and teens in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
The public portrayal of McCurdy’s life from TV screens, magazine covers, talk shows, red-carpet events to award ceremonies, was an absolute lie.
“I’m Glad My Mom Died” is a confessional feat that details raw, mordantly funny and evolutionary writing of her emotionally, mentally and physically abusive mother, past struggles with eating disorders and alcohol, and an acting career she was forced into at age six.
“There was this half of my life that was so cheesy and so polished and so glossy and so fake,” McCurdy told The Washington Post in its Aug. 5 article about the memoir. “And then there was this other part of my life that was so painful and real and raw and hurting, and that part was going completely unseen.”
Within the first several chapters, we’re taken through the memories of her being confined to the control of her mother, who directed her acting career, determined her meals starting at age 11 and administered her showers until she was 17 years old.
McCurdy’s dinners were composed of low-calorie bologna and pieces of lettuce sprayed with dressing. During McCurdy’s showers, her mother performed breast and vaginal exams on her that she said were inspections for cancer and shaved her legs while McCurdy remained scarcely educated about her body’s changes, even through her adolescent years.
Some of these showers, McCurdy explains in her book, she was forced to take with her older brother but the “exams” would only happen when her mother showered her alone.
“I say okay because I definitely don’t want cancer, and since Mom’s had it and all, she would know if I do,” McCurdy writes, though she also illustrates dissociation and out-of-body experiences during the violating, sexual abuse.
McCurdy also portrays her struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia and anxiety triggered by the relentless attention that came with fame while at the same time, staying loyal to her mother.
McCurdy’s mother taught her that she didn’t have a voice or autonomy: She was not a human being with thoughts and feelings, no, she was simply her mother’s property.
As she grows older, she insidiously conflicts with her own mind about her wants, needs and dislikes (feelings, basically). She pushes them out with confusion, hatred and fear like her mother can read her mind at any second and see how ungrateful she is.
McCurdy brings genuine testimony to the profoundness of uncertainty.
As a survivor of emotional, mental and physical abuse myself, the most powerful emotion I experienced for years was feeling confused on whether my feelings were valid, whether my pain was real.
“Sometimes I look at her and I just hate her. And then I hate myself for feeling that,” McCurdy writes in Chapter 34.
Despite the book’s title, “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” McCurdy’s sense of self was shattered when her mother, who recovered from breast cancer when McCurdy was a toddler, died of a cancer relapse in 2013.
The subsequent years, McCurdy details in her novel, were engrossed in alcohol abuse, bulimia and suffocating mental health issues.
Bulimia is an emotional disorder involving distortion of body image and an obsessive desire to lose weight, in which bouts of extreme overeating are followed by shame, depression and self-induced vomiting, purging or fasting.
The book’s title may be morbid and discomforting to many people and it should be.
Whether or not you had a narcissistic and abusive parent, the same conclusion will ring true to you after turning over the last page of the book: McCurdy would have remained squished under the excruciatingly heavy foot of her mother. She likely wouldn’t have survived.
Whatever a survivor feels is right for them in order to heal is exactly what’s right for them. For McCurdy, it was realizing that at 30 years old, she was glad her mother was dead. For me, it was completely removing my mother from life. For others, it may look different.
The latter third of the memoir details that long, winding, exhausting, back-and-forth journey of healing.
The first concrete step? Calling the abuse what it is: abuse.
Kirk Honda, a licensed therapist and a professor, reviewed McCurdy’s memoir in a two-part video on his YouTube Channel “Psychologist in Seattle.”
Honda said when dealing with survivors of childhood abuse, it’s crucial to validate their feelings and help them see the truth of the abuse so that they can learn how to have self-compassion.
“In order to recover and to heal and to know themselves and to stop blaming themselves for everything, you identify the abuse as abuse and identify the abusive person as an abusive person,” Honda said in his Aug. 15 YouTube video. “If they can do that, if they can say, ‘oh, it’s not my fault, it’s their fault and they made it my fault’ . . . it is an incredibly important developmental process.”
When I finished McCurdy’s memoir, I sat on my bed with a soft smile and a fixed stare into empty space as tears fell down my cheeks. I was both uplifted and dumbfounded over the fact that she was able to write her truth in such a raw and liberating way, and I write this book review with the hope that I can do the same as McCurdy some day.
“I’m Glad My Mom Died” has held the first-place slot in the New York Times BestSellers Print Hardcover nonfiction section since a few days after its Aug. 9 release.
One day after the book’s release, Amazon completely sold out of it, according to an Aug. 11 Rolling Stone article.
The public, which is made up of many who, at some point, favorited the teen star, didn’t have the slightest of clues that she was enduring that suffering, pain and abuse.
The one takeaway that readers should hold with them after finishing the book is that the same is true for many survivors of childhood abuse.
Whether it’s a stranger walking past you on the street, your coworker or classmate, or your roommate who you don’t really talk to, you never know the extent of suffering that someone has been forced to endure.
Be kind. Be patient. Be mindful.
For others who may relate to McCurdy’s memoir as I did: I hope you allow your inner child to feel valued and seen and take breaks from reading if you feel that you need to.
