I am too old to have watched Jeanette McCurdy on Nickelodeon, but I was vaguely aware of her before she started promoting this book. I also follow a lot of eating disorder recovery stuff, so I’d seen her podcast being suggested before this came out and was thus aware that the book was going to deal with her eating disorder a lot. Up front I will say that if you have an eating disorder and/or are in recovery from one, this book is super, super triggering and does not shy away from anything or come with any trigger warnings. So just a warning there, and a warning for this review as well. I am pretty settled in my recovery but it was a rough read for me.
I’m Glad My Mom Died is the story of an awful, abusive mom and her exploitation of and enmeshment with her daughter. Jeanette is really only freed by her mother’s death from cancer, which starts her on the road to being able to finally become independent and to seek treatment for her mental health. The majority of this memoir covers her childhood and early adolescence, though, which is a parade of terrible events and child abuse on every level. I really cannot overstate that this is a grim read, albeit one with a black sense of humor. It was very raw and emotionally honest, and I appreciated the level of openness that McCurdy shows here. Often you can tell that a memoir is holding stuff back because the author doesn’t want to push through to the most painful moments, but she sure does here.
There are lots of descriptions of eating disorder behaviors and their physical consequences, which did have the impact on me of mentally reaffirming my commitment to recovery because of how awful they were. However, I do think that the impact of books that describe eating disorder behaviors in such clear detail can cause weird competition or give people ideas — not to say that I don’t think she should have written this or that she should have to hide it, but a lot of the time when you read people’s accounts, they get tips from books like this. It’s a moral dilemma! I also can find it to be the author competing or showing off with how sick they were, and then rushing the recovery message at the end after 200+ pages of loving descriptions of being sick. And here most of the book is these in-depth descriptions with the last one being on page 297 out of 301. So it is a lot. I do really appreciate the openness she has and the overall message of hope and the positive impact of therapy. And I did like this book, it shows the toxicity of child acting and the terrible impact of a narcissistic parent. I just had hesitancy about anyone with an eating disorder reading it in search of a recovery narrative, because the recovery is a very minimal part of this book.
Warnings for: abusive parenting (physical, emotional, sexual), eating disorder descriptions in intense detail throughout, sexual harassment, cancer, mental illness (depression, anxiety, eating disorders, schizophrenia)