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I'm Glad My Mom Died Review

I didn't actually plan to make this my first review on this here little book review account, but I loved this book so much that I feel like it deserves a review while it's still fresh in my mind. I never listen to audiobooks but I will admit that, in rare form, I actually did for this book. Jennette McCurdy herself narrated it, which I think gave a lot of insight and a personal touch to the narration (although, if I can be a bit of an ass and critique her a little here, she read way too damn fast, and at times it was a little hard to keep up).

Two years ago, during my own experience recovering from a spiral into disordered eating, I stumbled upon McCurdy's YouTube channel where, before the release of her book, she uploaded podcast episodes and interviews divulging her experiences with disordered eating and her chaotic past. I found so much solace in these videos, and McCurdy's positive yet refreshingly cynical attitude was a huge comfort to me during a difficult time.

Hearing her voice as a writer in this book made my already-massive respect for her grow tenfold. The dysfunction in her childhood is hard to fathom - living in a hoarder house, a disconnected "father," an overbearing and abusive mother, growing up Mormon. There is much that I relate to, especially the "mother-as-best-friend" dynamic, which I myself have been unpacking recently. The realization that Jennette has in therapy, wherein the facade of her perfect mother begins to crack, was fucking gut-wrenching. In the audio recording, it is the only time she chokes out a sob, and... fuck dude. So did I. Jesus.

Her experience with disordered eating is something I, on a much smaller scale, can relate to - the desperate bid for control, the obsession with your body and numbers, the way other problems diminish as your eating disorder becomes all-consuming. However, I can't imagine the scale of her disorder, and the role it played in her life. With such little control, and with such scrutiny by her mother, the people orchestrating her career in the entertainment industry, the public eye, it's as if an eating disorder was the only thing she could have had to control it all, and to shut everything else out. As poor of a coping skill as eating disorders are, I can imagine how, while traumatic, it was also incredibly self-soothing. As Jenette says, eating disorders are the kind of thing you don't really understand until you've had one.

I was at first a bit annoyed by how short each chapter is, and I still feel as though many of them ended a bit abruptly. But I began to appreciate the brevity of each chapter - they each felt like their own short story within the greater context of her life, touching on so many different themes and tracking the minutiae of the periods of her life. Sex and dating and acting and OCD and EDs and her mom's abuse and cancer and dad-reveal are all woven together in small chapters, each one like a slap in the face. Much like Jennette, the reader is battered with traumatic events in succession, with little room to come up for air.

As I mulled about the battering of misfortunes that McCurdy has faced throughout her life, I thought, "How did chaos keep finding her?" And not only her - I've been thinking about my own life, lives of certain friends, of people I knew in school; the lives of people with messy childhoods, who seem to track this mess on their shoes into a muddy-footprinted adulthood. I think that, no matter how inadvertently, chaos follows chaos. You become a magnet for it. Because when you've grown up in it, when you can do a 360º spin and see nothing but chaos in all directions, you can't even see that there is a normal out there. And in your cocoon of chaos, you feel safe, soothed. A million voices at once, plus car crash and wall-punching and glass shattering noises, are going to deafen all the little individual voices in your head - the ones that tell you you're nothing, you're unlovable, you're a failure. So the abusive mom and eating disorders and schizophrenic boyfriend and impostor dad, all of it, seem to be not a random act of misfortunes, a cosmic fluke that caused one single person more grief than a dozen combined, but a testament to the fact that a traumatic childhood leads a person into a life of chaos. Only with reflection, with work, with therapy – with the courage to stop spinning, and to walk straight ahead past and through that 360º circle of chaos – can you finally end the cycle, turn the magnet around, be free of chaos for good.

While I read, I thought of The Bell Jar. Through it all, with gritted teeth, I waited until McCurdy's bell jar would lift - even just a little. And though it seems that her jar may never be all the way up, that her air may always be slightly acrid, it seems that she can now, finally, at least breathe well. That her jar has lifted enough for some reprieve. That is something we can all hope for.