Where to Start with Jennette McCurdy: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Jennette McCurdy — how to approach I'm Glad My Mom Died, her essential memoir of childhood abuse and recovery. A complete reading guide.
Jennette McCurdy (born 1992) is an American actress and writer who became famous as Sam Puckett on the Nickelodeon series iCarly (2007–2012) and its spin-off Sam & Cat before retiring from acting in her early twenties. I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), her debut memoir, debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and became one of the most celebrated memoirs of the decade — praised for McCurdy’s extraordinary voice, her refusal to sentimentalise, and the dark comedy that runs through even its most painful sections.
Where to Start: I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022)
The essential McCurdy — and one of the most remarkable memoir debuts in recent years. The title is the memoir’s argument in four words: not a provocation but an honest account of a complicated grief for a complicated person. Debra McCurdy wanted her daughter to be famous from the time Jennette was very small; she pursued this with an intensity and a controlling precision that she presented as love and that McCurdy spent years understanding as something else.
The memoir covers the child acting world — the auditions, the Nickelodeon years, the specific ways an industry built around children’s work can exploit the fact that children cannot advocate for themselves — with the specificity of someone who lived it. McCurdy writes about the unnamed creator who made her uncomfortable, the culture of normalising what shouldn’t be normal, and the specific anxieties of a teenage girl whose primary job is to be likeable on camera, with a clarity that the celebrity memoir genre rarely achieves.
But the memoir’s centre is Debra. McCurdy’s portrait of her mother is one of the most complex in recent non-fiction: a woman whose controlling behaviour and whose teaching of eating disorders as “calorie restriction” and “body checks” were genuine abuse, and who was also genuinely loved, and who believed she was expressing that love. The complexity is not a softening of the harm but a reckoning with how harm is transmitted — through love, through fear, through a mother’s own unprocessed damage.
McCurdy’s voice is the achievement. It is specific, direct, often very funny, and entirely without self-pity — a combination that is harder to achieve on the page than any of its components individually. The dark comedy that runs through the most painful sections is what makes them bearable and, paradoxically, more honest: laughter as a way of acknowledging the absurdity of what was done and survived, not as a way of diminishing it.
Reading Jennette McCurdy
I’m Glad My Mom Died is McCurdy’s debut and only memoir to date. It stands alone and requires no prior reading.
For the full Jennette McCurdy bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Jennette McCurdy author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Jennette McCurdy?
I'm Glad My Mom Died (2022) is McCurdy's debut and only memoir — her account of growing up as a child actress under a mother whose love was controlling and whose ambitions were her own, the eating disorders and anxiety that resulted, and her path to understanding and eventually escaping the patterns her childhood installed. One of the most remarkable memoirs of recent years; McCurdy's voice is extraordinary.
What is I'm Glad My Mom Died about?
I'm Glad My Mom Died covers McCurdy's childhood as an unwilling child actress pushed into the industry by her mother Debra, who managed her career and life with a controlling intensity that McCurdy came to recognise as emotional abuse. The memoir covers the eating disorders her mother taught her as 'calorie restriction,' the anxiety that permeated her work on iCarly, the exploitation she experienced from people in the industry, and — after her mother's death from cancer in 2013 — her gradual processing of both grief and relief.
Does I'm Glad My Mom Died have dark comedy in it?
The dark comedy in I'm Glad My Mom Died is one of its most distinctive and discussed qualities. McCurdy writes about genuinely terrible experiences — including childhood emotional abuse, eating disorders, and industry exploitation — with a specific, calibrated humour that is neither self-pity nor minimisation. The title itself is an example: not shocking for shock value but honest about the complexity of grief for someone whose death was also a relief. Many readers find the comedy what makes the book's difficult material bearable and, paradoxically, more rather than less honest.
What should I read after I'm Glad My Mom Died?
After I'm Glad My Mom Died, Chanel Miller's Know My Name is the closest literary companion — a memoir of survival and reclaiming one's own narrative with comparable literary quality and moral precision. Roxane Gay's Hunger covers eating disorders and body image from a different perspective with complementary literary quality. For memoirs about complicated mothers specifically, Carrie Fisher's Shockaholic and Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (about a difficult father) cover the emotional terrain with similar complexity.
