Jennette McCurdy isn’t ashamed to admit that comfort is a huge part of her life right now.
In her work, the former child star and New York Times bestselling author of the no-holds-barred 2022 memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died can be blunt and unsparing; but outside of it, she’s all about the warm and cozy. “I have a heating pad on my lap, my green juice, my water bottle, and my Christmas mug of coffee,” McCurdy says from her Southern California home, pulling her camera down to give a panoramic view of her desk. “I love a multibeverage situation.”
It’s been three years since McCurdy’s memoir cast a sharp eye on her life as a child actor — she’s best known for playing tough girl Samantha Puckett on the Nickelodeon sitcom iCarly — with a controlling, abusive mother. The book was a commercial and critical success and is in the process of being adapted for an Apple TV series starring Jennifer Aniston as her mother, with McCurdy attached as a writer. Following its release, McCurdy became a vocal critic of how Hollywood treats and disposes of child actors, noting how a manipulative system drove her to mental health issues and an eating disorder. And while comfort might be an inextricable part of her writing process, she’s doubling down on works that might make readers uncomfortable: This week sees the release of McCurdy’s debut novel, Half His Age, a story about a teenage girl and her transformative affair with her high school English teacher, a relationship that explores the permissible boundaries of desire and rage for both its main characters and the readers who open its pages.
“Female rage is something we’re not given permission to talk about enough. We’re told to stuff it down, keep it down, keep the smile on,” McCurdy says. “I wrote this book because I had so much unprocessed rage about aspects of my own life and my own personal relationships and story. This was a way for me to process some of that,”
Half His Age drops readers in the world and psyche of 17-year-old Waldo, an Alaska teen who lives in a trailer park and has an addiction to online shopping. But her entirely unsatisfying life takes a turn when she develops a sudden, almost epiphanic sexual attraction to her middle-aged teacher, Mr. Korgy. As she pursues a secret relationship with him, her wants, desires, and dreams about the future collide in a desperate mess. Half His Age is not an easy read or a particularly pleasant one, between Mr. Korgy’s clumsy sexual proddings and Waldo’s naive fumblings toward a sexually liberated adult life. But McCurdy tells Rolling Stone the novel is a fictional expression of some of the general frustration and anger she felt herself as a teen.
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“[Waldo] is brimming with desire and dissatisfaction. There’s no time where desire is more potent than when you’re 17 years old,” McCurdy says. “You’ve got your raging hormones. The world is so big and also can feel so small. And as a result of all of that, I think you’re just desperate for what else is out there, for more, for identity.”
McCurdy considered herself a writer long before I’m Glad My Mom Died ever hit shelves; after she stopped acting at 20, she dove into writing as an outlet for self-expression. Half His Age came to her as an idea while taking one of her first solo trips to Japan, nearly four years later. “I’m only putting this together now, but maybe there was a sense of independence and freedom that I felt on that trip,” she says. “I wanted to capture the opposite.”
While the novel’s narrative engine is the incredibly inappropriate age-gap relationship, the book’s most incisive commentary revolves around Waldo’s inability to stop online shopping during bouts of intense emotion. There are lengthy, detailed passages about flimsy fast-fashion dresses and skincare products Waldo purchases in manic or fugue states, only to rip into them later and find cheap facsimiles of the things that previously caused her to be on edge. Waldo’s digital shopping cart — and McCurdy’s brusque descriptions of her late-night binges — highlight the gaping, cavernous maw of her wants. And it makes her sexual interest in her married fortysomething teacher the least interesting thing about her. It’s a hidden truth McCurdy sees all around her: the secret desires of shoppers. “I have such a vivid memory of walking past a Victoria’s Secret and thinking about what these items represent,” McCurdy says. “That woman does not want a push-up bra, she wants to stop aging. That woman does not want a thong, she wants to feel desired by her husband of 30 years. The deeper want underneath is so much more interesting.”
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While McCurdy is open about the life experiences that make up her memoir, and the feelings that inspired her debut novel, the personal nature of the stories also mean she’s not willing to give up authority over how other versions of those narratives take shape. The book hasn’t been optioned yet, but she’s already finished adapting Half His Age into a screenplay and wants to direct it. The release date for Apple’s adaptation of I’m Glad My Mom Died, meanwhile, is up in the air following the departure of director Jason Reitman. McCurdy declined to comment on behind-the-scenes matters but stressed that she’s focused on maintaining creative control.
“Vision is a thing that can be really easy to get lost [and] misconstrued. My voice has got a very specific tone, which I think of as ‘funny-sad.’And it’s really easy to make things that are ‘funny sad’ flippant and melodramatic,” McCurdy says. “Having authority is what I feel from writing. Having power is what I feel from writing. And it’s so important to me that I protect my vision for projects at all costs.”
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If I’m Glad My Mom Died was a blunt confessional, then Half His Age is a fictional revenge story, one where McCurdy excavates emotions she herself had at 17. And if it makes you angry, about feminism or rampant consumerism or the power dynamics in age-gap relationships, even better — McCurdy still is, too.
“This [book] is for women with unprocessed rage. As a person who grew up a chronic people pleaser, I really could not accept my own anger. Anytime I get in touch with my anger, it leads me to a better path,” she says, adding, “It’s for the girls and the gays. I don’t need a single straight man to pick this up.”
