An eight-year-old Jennette McCurdy sits in the car with her mother, Debra, stuck in traffic on a long drive home.
It’s been a tough day for the little girl – she screwed up her audition for the latest network police drama, Without A Trace. These sorts of auditions were usually bread and butter for a child star like herself: Jenette was petite and cute, with big blue eyes that could well up with fat, blinking tears on cue.
But today, her heart wasn’t in it. She couldn’t cry in front of the casting director. The audition went badly, with Jennette explaining in her own words that she had ‘tanked’.
Now sat in a frosty silence with mum Debra, the littel girl is compelled to speak: ‘I don’t want to act anymore,’ she says.
Debra’s face contorts, ‘like she had just eaten a lemon’, Jennette remembers. Then the screaming starts. It’s a reaction the young actor was more than used to.
While this was all a familiar scene, it didn’t make it any less scary. So, after making her declaration, Jenette quickly backs down, muttering to her mother to ‘forget she ever said anything’.
Almost instantly, the mood changes, and Debra starts giddily singing along to a Phil Collins song like the moment never happened.
This harrowing moment is just one tale from Jennette McCurdy’s memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died, a breath-takingly frank and painfully truthful account of life under an abusive and manipulative parent who pushes her daughter into the cutthroat and problematic industry of child acting.
Just this week it was announced that the 2022 book, which spent over 80 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, was being brought to screen as an Apple TV+ drama.
Jennifer Aniston will not only be executive producer, but also star in the 10-part series as her narcissistic mother, with Jennette also on board as a co-writer.
Living the dream
By day, Jennette was a hugely adored child star, becoming a household name across the globe as the wisecracking tomboy Sam Puckett on Nickelodeon series iCarly, eventually landing her own spin-off series, Sam & Cat, alongside Ariana Grande.
While it looked as if the actor was living every child’s dream, reality was far more painful for Jennette. As well as having to navigate her mum’s outbursts, manipulations and abusive behaviour, she also found life on a hit children’s TV show, and dealing with directors, producers and executives, increasingly difficult.
Eight years after her departure from the world of children’s TV and with the world of acting firmly in her past, Jennette turned her attentions to writing, with I’m Glad My Mom Died exploring the struggles she faced as an abused child in a similarly abusive industry.
The book’s title is designed to disarm, with the iCarly star detailing the horror she suffered at the hands of Debra, who passed away in 2013, both darkly comic and deeply heart-breaking in equal measure.
When Jennette was just two years old, her mother was diagnosed with aggressive, stage four breast cancer. She nearly died from the disease, with some of her behaviours manifesting following her treatment. Having seen her mother suffer so much had a huge impact on the child star, who was desperate to make her happy.
A complicated relationship
In the early chapters of I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recalls her sixth birthday party, where she wished her mum could stay alive another year as she blew out the candles on her birthday cake.
The fear of loss meant the former child star acquiesced to mother’s demands, even if it made Jennette feel uncomfortable: agreeing to become an actor, taking up 14 dance classes a week, being pushed to audition for shows, even letting her mother wipe her bottom and clean her in the shower until she was 16, as to not upset her.
Jennette speaks openly in the book about how such pressure resulted in anxiety, shame and self-loathing, which then manifests in alcohol addiction and poor relationships.
Her anorexia and bulimia, which got so bad she rotted a tooth from constant vomiting, was directly instilled by her mother from an early age. Debra, who weighed 6.5 stone herself, encouraged strict calorie counting when Jennette was pre-pubescent so she could keep landing herself younger roles, and was seen as a way for them to ‘bond’ as they both shared small salads to keep their weight down.
While Jennette knew her attitude to food was deeply unhealthy, she struggled for years to recover, constantly relapsing.
Defying her mother’s wills, be it about food or anything else, gave Jennette brief pleasure, she explains in the book – but she also carried a long-term fear of Debra finding out.
When her cancer returned, any of Jennette’s perceived ‘wrongdoings’ (such as putting on weight or having secret boyfriends) became a stick Debra was more than willing to beat her daughter with – despite Jennette’s success meaning she was effectively the sole provider of their family’s income.
In one vicious email exchange, Debra tells her: ‘YOU caused my cancer to come back. I hope you’re happy knowing this. YOU have to live with this fact. YOU gave me cancer.
‘PS: reminder to send fridge money. Our yoghurt has soured.’
In an interview following the book’s publication, Jennette acknowledged her mother may have had mental health issues of her own.
‘She never sought help, never worked on any of her stuff,’ she explained. ‘I completely empathise with mental illness, but the fact that she didn’t try to change it, that’s a more complicated feeling for me.’
Getting help
Within the book, we also see Jennette seek therapy to try and tend to some of the wounds her mother left entrenched after she dies from cancer aged 56.
The first therapist she goes to listens as she describes her mother’s behaviour in detail, before broaching the idea that, maybe, her mother was an abuser. It’s a concept Jennette couldn’t comprehend.
‘My whole life, my entire existence has been orientated to the narrative that Mom wants what’s best for me,’ she writes. ‘If she didn’t… that means my entire life, entire point of view, entire identity has been built on a false foundation.’
It may have taken a long time, but the actor says she has finally come to terms with her childhood trauma – although she hasn’t entirely forgiven Debra for what she suffered at her hands.
In the book, Jennette acknowledges she has reached a point where she can sit within the two complex and conflicting opinions she has of her mother. She understands how Debra treated her was deeply wrong, and yet still misses her because she admired some of her qualities: her infectious happiness, her pep talks and childlike spirit.
Now, without having to appease a controlling mother, Jennette is able to live her life in a way she chooses to, discovering her true identity. Living in Los Angeles, she has signed a two-book deal following the success of her memoir, and hosted two podcasts, Empty Inside and Hard Feelings, both of which explore difficult and taboo topics.
And, of course, there’s the TV series based on her book. In their announcement, Apple said: ‘The dramedy will centre on the codependent relationship between an 18-year-old actress in a hit kid’s show, and her narcissistic mother who relishes in her identity as “a starlet’s mother”.’
Looking back on her life, Jennette confessed in a 2022 interview: ‘I genuinely felt I had no identity without my mom. I didn’t know who I was. I felt terrified, incompetent and incapable.
‘Eventually, the process for me was realising that those feelings were her conditioning. That was her voice, not mine, but it took a long time to get to a place where I could identify that I was, and am, glad that she died.’
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy (Simon and Schuster) is available to buy from all good bookshops.
A version of this article first appeared in September 2022.