I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette Mccurdy
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I'm Glad My Mom Died

4.7

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70,802 ratings


A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor—including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother—and how she retook control of her life.

Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,” eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?” She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly, she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!”), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.

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ISBN-10

1668022842

ISBN-13

978-1668022849

Print length

320 pages

Language

English

Publisher

Simon & Schuster

Publication date

September 10, 2022

Dimensions

6 x 0.8 x 9 inches

Item weight

11.7 ounces


Popular highlights in this book

  • Why do we romanticize the dead? Why can’t we be honest about them? Especially moms. They’re the most romanticized of anyone.

    Highlighted by 240 Kindle readers

  • My life purpose has always been to make Mom happy, to be who she wants me to be. So without Mom, who am I supposed to be now?

    Highlighted by 156 Kindle readers

  • How could I possibly be so upbeat when my surroundings were so obviously heavy? I was two.

    Highlighted by 138 Kindle readers


Product details

ASIN :

B09JPJ833S

File size :

2162 KB

Text-to-speech :

Enabled

Screen reader :

Supported

Enhanced typesetting :

Enabled

X-Ray :

Enabled

Word wise :

Enabled


Editorial reviews

“[A] layered account of a woman reckoning with love and violence at once…[Not] a flippant exposé of childhood stardom, nor an angry diatribe directed at an abuser. This complexity is what makes I’m Glad My Mom Died feel real…Some supposed literary types will think the immense popularity of I’m Glad My Mom Died—the hardcover initially sold out at many major bookstores—is merely the result of McCurdy’s former stardom and modern culture’s thirst for a sensational take. With its bold headline and bright cover featuring a smirking McCurdy holding a pink urn, the book feels deliberately marketed for virality, perfect for sharing on the internet and catching the eye of bookstore browsers. I’ve mentioned the title of this memoir to some people who have dismissed it out of hand, remarking that being glad one’s parent is dead is crude and a sentiment that should be kept to oneself. But those people haven’t read the book. McCurdy takes her time to remember difficult and complex moments of her life, staying true to her younger self while ultimately trying to come to terms with who she is as an independent adult. It’s a triumph of the confessional genre.”—Nina Li Coomes, The Atlantic

“Not many people rise to her level of fame or are so deeply abused, but McCurdy’s narrative will feel familiar to anyone who has navigated poverty and trauma. Taking advantage of the store discount at your dad’s retail job, tuning out screaming matches between parents, avoiding calls from debt collectors … this is what childhood is like for millions of Americans. Like many, I recognized myself in her words.”—Sabrina Cartan, Slate

“Unflinching…This year’s most candid book…I'm Glad My Mom Died made me laugh; it made me cry. It's such a funny, dark, moving, honest, real, uncensored book, and it's unlike anything I've ever read.”—Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon

“[The]number-one New York Times-bestselling memoir that has also achieved pop-cultural phenomenon status…I'm Glad My Mom Died is more than source material for a deluge of headlines about Grande and the slimy advances of a Nickelodeon svengali McCurdy calls simply ‘The Creator.’ McCurdy distinguishes herself from standard-issue celebrity memoir fare with a vivid, biting, darkly comic tone and an immersive present tense.”—Michelle Ruiz, Vogue

“For McCurdy, this book isn't just her writing debut. It's a reckoning with guilt and grief after her mother's premature death. It's healing from multiple eating disorders and processing decades of trauma. It's finally doing what she wants for the first time: not acting. Writing…Healing from trauma looks different for everyone: For McCurdy, writing this memoir symbolized empowerment over her narrative. And understanding that it's OK not to forgive her late mother provided her peace.”—Jenna Ryu, USA Today

“Judging simply by the shocking title of Jennette McCurdy’s debut memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, you may think the book is a no-holds-barred, scathing takedown of her mother and everyone else who perpetuated the horrifying upbringing that the former iCarly star endured, but you’d be wrong. McCurdy’s book is certainly revealing, describing the abuse she endured from her mother, who pushed her into acting at age 6, then guided her directly into an eating disorder and much worse until her death in 2013. But beyond that, it’s a measured, heartbreakingly poignant, and often laugh-out-loud-funny memoir with McCurdy showing more sympathy for her complicated mother than most people could even imagine mustering. However, what is perhaps most important about her memoir, which is smart, well-written, and powerful, is just how much hope and help it will surely provide to those suffering similar abuses right now.”—Scott Neumyer, Shondaland

“The new memoir from former child star Jennette McCurdy has an attention-grabbing title: I’m Glad My Mom Died. Over the course of the book, McCurdy, who built her name on Nickelodeon’s iCarly and Sam and Cat, more than makes her case, detailing years of her mother’s mental and physical abuse. The result is a detailed look at a very specific and individual childhood of horrors, but it also points to a major systemic problem. I’m Glad My Mom Died doubles as a damning indictment of the child star system…She paints a vivid picture of child stardom as a system in which children find themselves turned into walking piles of other people’s cash, and summarily dismantled when they lose their value. It’s damning both for the horrors she experienced as an individual and the systemic failures to which her story points.”—Constance Grady, Vox

“McCurdy’s book must be written by someone. Why? It must be done because there is someone out there right now who truly believes that life will never be any different. They truly believe that they will live under their parent’s thumb, never have the life they wanted, not trust their own agency, their own minds, and people like Jennette exist to tell them: You are not wrong, you can trust yourself. You can do this too.”—Erin Taylor, Observer

“A stunning memoir…[McCurdy] reveals herself to be a stingingly funny and insightful writer, capable of great empathy and a brutal punchline. It’s a document not just of all she’s endured, but also of the wisdom she accrued along the way.”—Sam Lansky, Time

“A coming-of-age story that is alternately harrowing and mordantly funny.”—Dave Itzkoff, The New York Times

“[A] magnum opus…sharply funny and empathetic.”—Ashley Spencer, The Washington Post

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Sample

1.

THE PRESENT IN FRONT OF me is wrapped in Christmas paper even though it’s the end of June. We have so much paper left over from the holidays because Grandpa got the dozen-roll set from Sam’s Club even though Mom told him a million times that it wasn’t even that good of a deal.

I peel—don’t rip—off the paper, because I know Mom likes to save a wrapping paper scrap from every present, and if I rip instead of peel, the paper won’t be as intact as she’d like it to be. Dustin says Mom’s a hoarder, but Mom says she just likes to preserve the memories of things. So I peel.

I look up at everyone watching. Grandma’s there, with her poofy perm and her button nose and her intensity, the same intensity that always comes out when she’s watching someone open a present. She’s so invested in where gifts come from, the price of them, whether they were on sale or not. She must know these things.

Grandpa’s watching too, and snapping pictures while he does. I hate having my picture taken, but Grandpa loves taking them. And there’s no stopping a grandpa who loves something. Like how Mom tells him to stop eating his heaping bowl of Tillamook Vanilla Bean Ice Cream every night before bed because it won’t do any good for his already failing heart, but he won’t. He won’t stop eating his Tillamook and he won’t stop snapping his pictures. I’d almost be mad if I didn’t love him so much.

Dad’s there, half-asleep like always. Mom keeps nudging him and whispering to him that she’s really not convinced his thyroid is normal, then Dad says “my thyroid’s fine” in an irritated way and goes back to being half-asleep five seconds later. This is their usual dynamic. Either this or an all-out scream-fight. I prefer this.

Marcus, Dustin, and Scottie are there too. I love all of them for different reasons. Marcus is so responsible, so reliable. I guess this makes sense since he’s basically an adult—he’s fifteen—but even so, he seems to have a sturdiness to him that I haven’t seen in many other adults around me.

I love Dustin even though he seems a bit annoyed by me most of the time. I love that he’s good at drawing and history and geography, three things I’m terrible at. I try to compliment him a lot on the things he’s good at, but he calls me a brownnoser. I’m not sure what that is exactly, but I can tell it’s an insult by the way he says it. Even so, I’m pretty sure he secretly appreciates the compliments.

I love Scottie because he’s nostalgic. I learned that word in the Vocabulary Cartoons book Mom reads to us every day, because she homeschools us, and now I try to use it at least once a day so I don’t forget it. It really does apply to Scottie. “A sentimentality for the past.” That’s definitely what he has, even though he’s only nine so doesn’t have much of a past. Scottie cries at the end of Christmas and the end of birthdays and the end of Halloween and sometimes at the end of a regular day. He cries because he’s sad that it’s over, and even though it barely is over, he’s already yearning for it. “Yearning” is another word I learned in Vocabulary Cartoons.

Mom’s watching too. Oh, Mom. She’s so beautiful. She doesn’t think she is, which is probably why she spends an hour doing her hair and makeup every day, even if she’s just going to the grocery store. It doesn’t make sense to me. I swear she looks better without that stuff. More natural. You can see her skin. Her eyes. Her. Instead she covers it all up. She spreads liquid tan stuff on her face and scrapes pencils along her tear ducts and smears lots of creams on her cheeks and dusts lots of powders on top. She does her hair up all big. She wears shoes with heels so she can be five foot two, because she says four foot eleven—her actual height—just doesn’t cut it. It’s so much that she doesn’t need, that I wish she wouldn’t use, but I can see her underneath it. And it’s who she is underneath it that is beautiful.

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About the authors

Jennette Mccurdy

Jennette Mccurdy

New York Times Bestselling Author Jennette McCurdy has been showcasing her multitude of talents for over 20 years, with more than 100 credits under her belt between film and TV. Most recently, Jennette has chronicled the unflinching details surrounding her life and rise to fame in her memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died, which stayed at #1 on the NYT bestseller list for 52 consecutive weeks and has been in the top 5 on the NYT best seller list for 44 straight weeks. In the inspiring book of resilience and independence, Jennette uses candor and dark humor as she dives into her struggles as a former child actor—including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother—and how she retook control of her life. In addition to her impressive acting resume, Jennette is an accomplished creator. Her darkly comedic one-woman show “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” which she wrote, directed, and stars in, had a sold-out run at Lyric Hyperion Theatre. Jennette has been at the forefront of writing and directing Strong Independent Women and Kenny, which was featured on Short of the Week and nominated for the Grand Jury Prize for Best Short Film at the Florida Film Festival. Her works have also been published in the Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and The Hollywood Reporter.

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Reviews

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5

70,802 global ratings

Red5394

Red5394

5

good luck putting this down

Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2024

Verified Purchase

I read this entire book in a day. Jennette is an unbelievably good writer, and captures the main points of her life that have led her to where she is today very well. It is very sad, but an important read for those of us who grew up watching her on Nickelodeon. Child actors often suffer more than we know or think, as they have little to no control of their lives, and basically no one to trust if their parent(s) are not truly supporting them. This book takes you behind the scenes of Jennette's life from being forced into acting as a six year old, to growing up with an overbearing, abusive, manipulative mother, to beginning her healing journey only a few years ago. I will not give any spoilers at all, but will say that this extremely well written, captivating, depressing, funny (in rather twisted ways), and illuminating. I highly recommend this book - I know I will be reading it again!

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11 people found this helpful

Diane Burroughs

Diane Burroughs

5

Gifted Storyteller

Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2024

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Jennette McCurdy, child Star of Kids shows iCarly, and Sam and Cat is a gifted, storyteller. Now 31, Jennette hasn’t written another self-help workbook or how-to book. She reveals her domineering, maniacal mother and their dynamics with hilarity, pathos, and agony. “Naked” is the best way to describe how our author depicts her fascinating journey. She was not without a plethora of trauma: • Waking at 4am for her first day at age 6 as background on the show X-files • Growing up in a hoarder household • The impact of being a Mormon • Stardom • Emancipating herself from the bondage of an eating disorder instigated by mom • Her struggle to develop into a woman The reader is sucked into Jennette’s very entertaining, pungently real, and disturbing world. “How many times can you pratfall over a carpet or sell a line you don’t believe in before your soul dies?” Debra McCurdy was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer when Jennette was two. Jennette’s two purposes growing up were; 1) to be the closest person in the world to her mother and 2) keeping her mother alive. Every birthday Jennette wished her mother to live another year believing her mother’s life was in her little hands. Debra loved to recount her cancer story to the family. “She goes so far as to MC a weekly rewatch of a home video she made shortly after learning of her diagnosis. ‘All right, everyone, shhhh. Let’s be quiet. Let’s watch and be grateful for where Mommy is now’ “Mom says.” Jennette reveals the fragility of her Mom’s life became the center of hers. It was drilled into Jennette’s consciousness that her grandparents killed her mother’s dream of a life of fame and fortune as an actress. Therefore, mom was hell-bent on giving the life her parents wouldn’t let her have to “Net”, Jennette’s nickname. When she asked Jennette if she wanted to be “mommy’s little actress,” there was only one right answer. “Yes, mommy.” If you’re struggling with a love/hate relationship with mom, need validation on how heroic you are for your independence from mom, or just want to read a terrific memoir, this is a must-read.

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40 people found this helpful

KLM

KLM

5

A Hilarious and Heartbreaking Memoir

Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2024

Verified Purchase

My kids grew up watching the crazy antics of Samantha Puckett on “iCarly “and “Sam & Cat” – Nickelodeon shows that were popular in the 2010s when my children were the target market for such entertainment. Jeanette is a natural at embodying the eccentric Sam. It is a testament to her acting ability that no one knew that she was secretly enduring terrible pressure and pain in her personal life.

Although very successful in her career, Jeanette never wanted to be an actress, much less famous. It was the dream of her narcissistic, manipulative, and abusive mother. Jeanette, the devoted and loyal daughter, embraced these goals never wanting to disappoint or upset “Nonny Mommy.” This came at a high price.

Jeanette outlines growing up in a “hoarder house” with brothers, grandparents, and dysfunctional parents all living under one roof. Her life involved acting classes/auditions, religious guilt, being taught and constantly encouraged to engage in eating disorders while dealing with the pressure of financially supporting her family from a young age. Not her dream, but totally her responsibility. It is no wonder that there is fallout: addictions, unhealthy relationships, sexual hang-ups, misguided loyalty, stunted growth, anxiety, and secrets. With the recent release of the documentary, “All Quiet On Set,” this memoir adds to the uncomfortable and painful glimpse into the child star experience.

Jeanette is truly an exceptional writer – her words are raw, deeply honest, and laugh out loud funny, completely capturing the absurdity of the situations she finds herself in, whether by choice or circumstance. She lays it all out there as she struggles to break free from the abusive bonds. Ultimately, it is very satisfying to see her walk away from acting and walk toward personal growth and redemption.

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21 people found this helpful

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