Family trauma shapes a student’s affair with her teacher in this bleak and funny fiction debut from the American memoirist
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hen 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.
