Jennette McCurdy's Memoir Hurts
And it Made Me Feel Really, REALLY Guilty
I listened to this audio book while I was driving and that was a bad idea. Not because this memoir itself is bad, but because I was sad and being sad made me cry which made it difficult to see the road which was not an ideal driving condition.
Jeanette McCurdy writes with a raw and sardonic honesty that echoes characters she’s past portrayed, but is authentically her own. And knowing her words as her own lived story makes listening to her voice recount the abuse and trauma she’s gone through that much more painful.
Because her fame came at the cost of her childhood and her privacy.
Because we, as a society, watched her grow up on Nickelodeon without the faintest idea that she was suicidal.
I have a weird thing for celebrities making memoirs or autobiographies. I don’t usually like them, especially when people are young (am I being ageist? Probably. Oh well). It’s harping on the idea that there is so much life to live. How could you possibly know the ins and outs of the world at 22? What way has the world wronged you at 15 to make you put out an 45-minute YouTube post about it? And to that…Every person lives life according to the beat of their own drum, and if they spin it into a story so be it. Every story deserves to be told, but we as an audience do not have to listen.
That’s not the case for McCurdy’s book. She’s a handful of years older than me, but I remember seeing her on iCarly and then on Sam & Cat and thinking how cool her character was. Blunt, stubborn, slightly condescending, but always looking out for her friends.
She was a real tomboy and she didn’t care about what society thought of her. Which is ironically and vastly different from who McCurdy is in real life. Chef’s kiss: ✨ acting ✨
Brought up in the church and then obsessed with being an ideal for a mother who abused her made me shake with anger and absolute, incredible crushing guilt.
Here she was, playing Sam Puckett, my favorite stalwart character on the show— and her home life was less than put together. Traumatized, emotionally abused, rigor mortis with fear of failure and not performing the way others wanted her to perform.
All that was happening and as a child watching the screen I never knew any of that was going on.
Hence my secondhand and most definitely misplaced guilt. In no way could I have known this is what she was going through. In no way could I, as a 12-year-old who could barely reach the counter, do anything about it. And yet it happened. It happened in the public and the private eye because of her status and her childhood stardom. It happened on the watch of trusted adults and executives who abused their power to no ends. It happened, and there’s nothing we can do to make it so it didn’t. Which is where the entertainment industry needs to do better, for the next generation and for those still fighting to be in it. We can do better. We have to do better.
The abuse and the self hatred and the mental illnesses, pried from privacy by persistent paparazzi until McCurdy wrote her own story and laid her heart out to bare.
Which is a vulnerable thing. A scary thing to do. A would-be terrifyingly impossible thing to do except…
McCurdy is a writer. She has always wanted to be a writer but was shutdown by a mother who could only see Hollywood lights in her eyes. So the fact that she is owning and reflecting and growing from writing her own story? Is a beautiful and wonderful thing I don’t even have words to describe.
And I’m a writer too.
