I'm Glad My Mom Died
Jennette McCurdy, 2022
A former Nickelodeon child star describes a childhood run by her mother, with deadpan humour and a hard-won ability to name what it cost. Deadpan and brisk, the voice stays witty while unease builds under scenes of family control and a child's slow reckoning.
Feels like unease and curiosity. About family, identity and freedom.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you read memoirs for a sharp, funny voice that does not soften hard family history. Some stretches dwell on a mother's control and the narrator's anger, so it is not a comfortable or gentle read.
Why read it
It gives a clear-eyed account of a public childhood and the private cost of pleasing a parent, told with wit that keeps the sadness readable.
A page from the book
What the anger is doing for you, and what it spares you.
I’m becoming an angry person with no tolerance for anyone. I’m aware of this shift and yet have no desire to change it. If anything, I want it. It’s armor. It’s easier to be angry than to feel to pain underneath it. Jennette McCurdy.McCurdy played Sam Puckett on iCarly and Sam & Cat; she has said she quit acting to write and direct, and began her podcast Empty Inside partly to explain why.
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Questions readers ask
- Is I'm Glad My Mom Died for me?
- You may like it if you read memoirs for a sharp, funny voice that does not soften hard family history. Some stretches dwell on a mother's control and the narrator's anger, so it is not a comfortable or gentle read.
- What is I'm Glad My Mom Died like?
- Deadpan and brisk, the voice stays witty while unease builds under scenes of family control and a child's slow reckoning. Feels like unease and curiosity. About family, identity and freedom.
- What should I read after I'm Glad My Mom Died?
- If you liked I'm Glad My Mom Died, try Educated (Tara Westover), Everything I Never Told You (Celeste Ng) and Born a Crime (Trevor Noah).
A taste of the feed
What an apology can build after it has arrived too late.
You were my child. I should have protected you. I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.
Educated · Tara Westover
What a parent's accent does to the shape of a sentence.
My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron. Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.
Running with Scissors · Augusten Burroughs
A man writes a letter that is mostly a knife, and exactly correct about the sums.
Your income has always been ample, and you never ought to have borrowed any money, and Mary Towle did a great wrong in lending you any money. My opinion of you is the same as it always has been—that you are an extravagant, deceitful, dishonest, worthless person. You have squandered thousands of dollars and left your honest debts unpaid. But I do not think you are capable of comprehending the mistakes that you have made. Now that you are paying up Mary Towle, how would it do to pay the various other accounts that you owe?
Me · Katharine Hepburn
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