3 hours ago
3
When it was published in 2022, Jennette McCurdy’s memoir lit a touchpaper to a nascent cultural conversation. I’m Glad My Mom Died introduced her mother Debra’s narcissistic personality disorder into a world eager to discuss adult child and parent estrangement. McCurdy had also suffered sexual abuse, and claimed her mother had contributed to her developing an eating disorder. The memoir was a bestseller, walking readers through the realities of generational trauma; a step change for the former Disney child star who had been “the funny one” on obnoxious Nickelodeon kids’ shows.
In her debut work of fiction, Half His Age, McCurdy continues to shake open a Pandora’s box, shedding light on blurred parent-child boundaries and loss of identity due to over-enmeshment, with solid one-liners that feel straight out of a sitcom writers’ room.
Lead character Waldo is a high school senior whose life doesn’t seem to be her own. She play-acts through sexual encounters and disassociates at the school disco (“I stand off to the side watching, enveloped by a blanket of catatonia”). We soon find out that these reactions have been handed down from her chaotic mother. McCurdy writes the “Mom” as a comedic grand guignol, the damage she has writ on her child seeping out throughout the novel as though from invisible bullet wounds. Their relationship shifts uneasily between friends, siblings and caretaker (“I’ve been managing my mom’s emotions since I was five”). Waldo remembers Mom giving her advice on seduction when she was five (“the best way to keep a man is to be as pretty as you can be”), with tips from the tradwife school: to essentially morph into whoever your man wants you to be.
We see Waldo in scene after scene coming home to an empty house, her only company a sea of brightly coloured Post-It notes and instructions on how to reheat her next unsatisfying TV dinner. She copes via an online shopping addiction (“Tab tab tab tab. Cart cart cart cart. Desperate to chase away this heavy emptiness”) in which household items, junk food and useless fast fashion purchases become shorthand for the emotional wasteland she feels herself to be trapped in.
Running on fumes, Waldo plunges headfirst into a pursuit of her married English teacher, Mr Korgy. McCurdy’s writing here is textured: Waldo’s observations are often savage but laced with humanity. Korgy is a complicated villain: a failed author turned teacher who grew up on World of Warcraft, loves Matchbox Twenty songs and is trapped in his own life. We wade about uncomfortably in the deep end of their uneven dynamic, from father-daughter to Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. McCurdy writes gleefully about Waldo’s lust/disgust as she fantasises about licking his hairy paunch, and the desperate car-crash energy that buzzes between the two of them. Maybe this is a stand-in for her shopping and junk food addictions – or maybe she’s just bored.
Obsession becomes tragicomic and crushingly mundane. The scenes of intimacy are a particular masterclass, McCurdy linking Waldo’s masochism with the illusion of control in the very uneven power dynamic. And when their relationship splutters in the harsh light of reality, McCurdy revs up to a final sex scene, which tone-shifts effortlessly from body horror to French farce. Half His Age is a bleak, often hilarious and uncomfortable triumph that underscores McCurdy’s talent for focusing in on the multilayered nature of trauma and artfully unpicking it, one scab at a time.
