Rebecca's Reviews > I’m Glad My Mom Died

(4.5) My reaction in emoji form: 🤯🤣🤯😭🤯 (and repeat until the end). When I first heard about this book in late 2022, I thought there was no chance I would ever read it, because I'd just lost my own mother at the end of October and the title struck me as flippant and disrespectful; a comedian milking her grief for inappropriate laughs. Then again, I didn't know anything about her narcissistic, controlling, downright abusive mother. I hadn't heard of the author either, though I probably did see her cameo performance on Malcolm in the Middle back in the day, so I didn't experience this as a celebrity autobiography except in the sense that she writes about Hollywood and being a reluctant child actor.

I'm glad I got over my prejudice about the title and the celeb thing and gave this a try, because it is an incredible re-creation of relationships, states of mind and incidents from childhood onward. I'm just starting to think about writing memoir myself, and I so admired how the book - true to McCurdy's background in acting and directing - is based around scenes and dialogue, cleverly structured with her mother's deathbed as the prologue and a visit to her grave in the last chapter, and how the present-tense narration mimics her viewpoint starting at age six and moving toward the present.

Think just how much imaginative work was required to put herself back into her mindset at that time and make her chaotic late-1990s California household, presided over by a hoarding Mormon cancer survivor, feel just as real as settings and events from recent years. There's no way she could remember what people literally said or did, but she captures the emotions of the moment and the essence of the interactions. Because we as readers, too, experience her feelings and reactions as they were at the time, we can see how unhealthy habits started to develop and are less quick to be horrified at them as judgmental outsiders.

The best way I can describe it is that, for as far back as I can remember, the air in the house has felt like a held breath. Like we're all in a holding pattern, waiting for Mom's cancer to come back.

It is an honor that Mom cares about me so much that something like me having my own favorite color would devastate her.

I've spent my whole life studying her ... because I always want to do whatever I can in any given moment to keep or make Mom happy.

It was never going to go well, was it? Her mother's explanation for pushing her daughter into acting was "I want to give you the life I never had, Net. I want to give you the life I deserved. The life my parents wouldn't let me have." McCurdy hated acting from the start but went along with it to please her mother and became known for two Nickelodeon shows. Her cachet as a child actor depended on looking young, so when puberty hit she did all she could to slow it down through calorie restriction, which her mother taught her.

The years of eating disorders that resulted are only the tip of the iceberg of what I think one would technically refer to as The F*cked-Up Sh*t that went on in this family. The whole thing is one big trigger warning, really. McCurdy lived as much in her first 25 years as many of us will do in a lifetime. The mind-blowing revelations keep coming all the way through. So much is sad. "I'm too young to be bitter. Especially as a result of a life that people supposedly envy. And I fear that I resent my mother. The person I have lived for. My idol. My role model. My one true love." And yet it is a very funny book in its observations and turns of phrase. What a remarkable balance.

This narrowly misses out on a 5-star rating from me because the writing is not always fantastic (grammar, word usage, etc.); it's clear she's more interested in informality and readability than literary accomplishment. And that's fine. But it means I appreciate it more for the stranger-than-fiction story than for the prose, and can see what Lena Dunham meant by dubbing it "an important cultural document" (maybe not the exact praise a debut author is looking for?).

More favorite lines: "I feel like the world is divided into two types of people: people who know loss and people who don't. And whenever I encounter someone who doesn't, I disregard them."