Book Review: I'm Glad My Mum Died

As a teenager growing up in the mid-2010’s, I was not overly familiar with iCarly, or it’s iconic co-star Jennette McCurdy.  I knew of the show’s existence and in turn saw her character on screen anytime I managed to catch myself flipping through channels and landing on an episode of the show.  To me the show was always too loud and in your face with its style of child-orientated sitcom humour so I never gave it much of a second thought.  I note this because it’s easy to take something at face value and not consider the deeper realities behind it.  Jennette’s character in the show seemed overly obnoxious to me and rather annoying, never would I have ever considered that behind the camera lens McCurdy was not that person and was actually someone with a lot of emotional issues that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.  The reality of McCurdy’s life is filled with manipulation and abuse when you realize she never had a choice in the role defined for her by her mother since childhood.  That tragedy serves as the core basis for her personal memoir titled, I’m Glad My Mum Died.

Ever since McCurdy was a child, she wanted to do nothing but make her mother happy.  While this may seem like an innocent and genuine aspiration, McCurdy takes great effort to reflect how her mum used that intention maliciously.  This memoir puts great focus on the tumultuous relationship the pair shared as McCurdy’s mother controlled and directed every aspect of her life right up to her final moments.  It shines a spotlight on the acting career she was forced into and how her mum conditioned her daughter to such an insane level of instruction. While McCurdy at the time was raised to believe this was her mother’s way of showing love and affection for her child, the memoir offers her the ability to confront the ugly truth of the clearly toxic relationship the pair shared up the very end and how it resulted in a lot of major mental and physical issues for McCurdy which she still faces to this very day.

As a memoir, I think this is an incredibly honest piece of work from McCurdy.  I cannot imagine the amount of strength and resiliency it took to trudge through the dark and troubling history she clearly had with her mother.  McCurdy writes in a fairly transparent format when it comes to breaking down the moments of her early child hood all the way up to her mid-20’s.  While McCurdy’s mother serves as a central anchor point for the majority of the book, it is worth noting how she loses her presence in the second half of the book as McCurdy dedicates a good portion of the book to talking about her later individual problems. I’m slightly disappointed with how limited the reflective approach of the book comes to the forefront however.  A lot of this book is McCurdy laying out her life in a very detailed fashion, but she reserves her reflection on these moments for a good course of it’s page count.  It’s written in a sense that we understand the mindset and context she had in the moment, but I think it’s a missed opportunity to truly reflect on it. The reader can interpret a lot of the finer details of these moments and form their own judgements but McCurdy misses an opportunity I feel to directly confront these memories rather than simply recount them.

In terms of structure, I think the book is a fairly digestible progression through the key moments of McCurdy’s life.  She’s detailed in recounting specific moments and memories which bare significance for her and she never lingers on moments too long. A lot of this helps to make working through the book feel a lot easier than other memoirs I’ve read. McCurdy has a good sense of timing and she get’s her points across quite well.  I do find it odd despite the title of the book however; the latter half of the book fails to account for McCurdy’s mother within the context of her issues.  It stems back to my earlier nitpick about the lack of reflection.  I can piece together how her mother’s dietary control and other forms of abuse links in with McCurdy’s later issues in life, but I think McCurdy doesn’t make enough of an effort to reflect on them in relation to her mother’s abuse. McCurdy saves the reflective consideration for the ending portion of the book which while is appropriate, feels limited in retrospect when the entirety of the book could have utilized it.

I don’t mean for this review to come off as overly negative.  I think as a memoir, McCurdy does a fantastic job in laying out a clearly troubled life which no one was any the wiser from seeing her on our television screens growing up. Her decision to go deep and intimate with her recounting of these uncomfortable moments helps gives us as readers a lot to empathise and potentially relate with. It serves as a compelling reading experience despite it’s missed potential and it’s given me a lot of pause for thought about how generational trauma is a shared element amongst so many people, even people who you might never even suspect.