Half His Age author Jennette McCurdy: ‘Do we ever grow out of wanting to feel special?’

You know what they say: success is the best revenge. In Jennette McCurdy’s case, revenge was a dish best served on the New York Times bestseller list, where her 2022 memoir about her emotionally abusive mother, I’m Glad My Mom Died, spent over a year and a half. But the book, which has now sold more than three-and-a-half million copies and is being turned into an Apple TV show with Jennifer Aniston playing her mother, was never about vengeance. It was about closure.

In it, the former child actor was unsparing – and also, somehow, funny – about the traumatic years she spent in the spotlight, dogged in private by an eating disorder and stuck in a web of controlling relationships. It was a staggering first book, but it was by no means McCurdy’s first time writing.

Even at 11, McCurdy, not yet the megawatt child star of Nickelodeon’s iCarly but already a familiar face on the TV circuit, dreamed of being a writer. Dreams that were quickly crushed by her mother. “Writers dress frumpy and get fat, you know?” McCurdy was told, as she recalled in her memoir. “I would never want your little actress’s peach butt to turn into a big, giant writer’s watermelon butt.” Now, with a bestseller to her name and her daring new novel, Half His Age, already causing a splash, it’s safe to say the risk paid off. And then some.

“It was scary,” she says, now 33, reflecting on her decision to quit acting at 24 to pursue life as an author. “It was not easy to say goodbye to a career I’d had success in. No one was knocking on my door asking to read anything I wrote, but I knew in my body that it was time and that it was right for me. I’m so glad I trusted myself because that really was so bold – maybe bolder than I am now.” She gives a small, incredulous laugh, “Honestly, really, really bold. I thank my past self for that.”

Half His Age is certainly bold. An unflinching, uncomfortable tale of power dynamics and disaffected youth, the novel is told from the perspective of Waldo, a lonely 17-year-old girl living in Alaska, who spends her days online shopping and having uninteresting sex with uninteresting boys. Then comes Mr Korgy, her married 40-year-old creative writing teacher whom she pursues relentlessly. He, of course, gives in and the two begin a lurid affair.

Already Half His Age has drawn comparisons to Lolita (and granted, there are enough graphic sex scenes to make reading it on public transport a gamble), but McCurdy’s voice is all her own: clear-eyed realism coupled with emotional honesty. Throw into the mix a good deal of rage – for Waldo yes, but also for the reader who is practically screaming through the pages for Waldo to leave this walking red flag of a man.

McCurdy was in the middle of writing a different novel when the idea for Half His Age surfaced like a bruise, the kind that appears overnight with no memory of how it got there. So she pivoted and, 30 days later, had a full first draft. “For me, if the seed of a project and those initial stages are really emotionally charged and emotion-led, that’s a good sign,” she says. “If I need to find closure on a thing or if I need to process my emotions towards a thing, that tends to be the thing that I’m writing about.”

McCurdy didn’t know it when she started writing, but Waldo’s story ended up being, at least partly, a way of processing a past age-gap relationship of her own, something she touched upon in her memoir. He was in his mid-thirties and had a girlfriend; she was 18 and working in showbiz. What began as shared glances on set led to clandestine fumblings followed by an imbalanced relationship that eventually fizzled out over mild annoyances, like the way he chewed food. Today, you might call it getting the ick.

open image in gallery

“I personally processed a lot of rage that I had [over that relationship], and maybe didn’t even realise that I still had,” says McCurdy. Half His Age is fiction, but there are elements lifted from McCurdy’s life – Mr Korgy calls her “mature for her age” and delights in showing Waldo his library of David Foster Wallace books and French films.

“Look, I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman who hasn’t been forced to sit through a dozen films she hates to impress a guy. We’ve all done it! I mean, I did – my God!” she laughs. In McCurdy’s case, it was a feigned interest in Dazed and Confused. For me, it was the 12-hour director’s cut of Lord of the Rings. McCurdy sees these anecdotes as “beautiful” in a way – an indicator of “how deeply women care” and our “need to help others feel seen” through something as seemingly trivial as liking the same boring book.

McCurdy has been with her current partner, whose identity she keeps private, for nine years and counting. “I spent really my whole twenties working on myself – and I still actively work on myself – but it did take a lot of work,” she says. “It did take a lot of unpacking of my past to really sit with it and understand the root of why I had gone down the paths that I had, to ensure that I went down better, stronger paths moving forward – and yes, I’m happy to say I’m on those paths now.”

open image in gallery

Listening to the low-pitched raspiness of McCurdy’s voice, it’s impossible not to think of Sam Puckett, the roughhousing wisecracker she played for seven years on iCarly, and its spin-off series Sam & Cat with Ariana Grande – both topics I’m requested not to ask about today. But McCurdy isn’t deadpan or sardonic like Sam. Rather, she’s warm and effusive. Writing! Hair! The mind-numbing ritual of online shopping! Any topic seems to light her up; we bond early on over the hazards of an unruly fringe.

It’s obvious from the way McCurdy talks, and also from reading her books, that she has done a lot of work to get to this point. Yet she remains playfully self-aware, catching herself whenever she uses therapy-speak. “I’m not rubbing crystals so I think I’m good,” she laughs, after letting slip the woo-woo term “aligned”.

Like Waldo – who believes Mr Korgy would devote himself to her if only she could “wedge myself into a doll, a dream, a marionette with lifeless eyes, porcelain skin, and no needs of my own” – McCurdy spent the majority of her adolescence buffing her edges and contorting her frame to fit the needs of others: her boyfriends, her bosses, her mother. Her desire to make others happy was so severe it led to unhealthy relationships, obsessive compulsive disorder and an eating disorder that took years of therapy to overcome.

“Do we ever grow out of wanting to feel special?” McCurdy repeats my question. “No! No, no. I wish we did. It’s a natural part of life, wanting to be picked, wanting to avoid rejection, wanting to be wanted. I’m 33 and I still feel it. I want to be chosen. I don’t want to be rejected. That’s not fun.”

She might be a NYT bestseller now, but that didn’t happen overnight. “From 24 to 28 I was writing exhaustively and sending things to people who wouldn’t even open the PDF,” she says. “There were days where I’d be crying and just thinking if I could just make $1 as a writer, you know if I could just make a living at this, however small… because I was by no means set up for life at all.”

open image in gallery

By the age of 10, McCurdy was already the breadwinner of her family. It was her paycheques from bit parts on shows like Malcolm in the Middle and Will & Grace that kept the lights on in the cluttered home in South California that she shared with her parents, three brothers, and grandparents.

“I had pretty intense financial anxiety for a long time. If I’m being totally honest, right up until the success of the memoir,” she says now. “After that, I felt more safe and secure and some of that washed away. But I was never particularly spendy or anything. That said, I definitely have 10 tabs open right now with 10 different carts loaded.” She channels some of that frenetic shopping energy into Half His Age, where Waldo is prone to online shopping sprees, buying a landfill’s worth of Shein in two minutes flat. “I think we all know how that feels to buy something thinking it will change everything and then it never does,” she says.

Fame as an author has been revelatory for McCurdy, whose previous experience in the spotlight during her Nickelodeon heyday was defined by “people grabbing my arm very tightly and speaking way too close to my face, and taking pictures”. She mimes being violently pulled here and there. Now, “Oh my God! It’s night and day! The interactions are rooted in mutual respect and connection. These are people that I would want to hang out with. And for whom I feel a real commonality and love.”

open image in gallery

She has no plans to return to that other form of fame – and so will not be starring opposite Aniston in the forthcoming Apple TV adaptation of her memoir. It’s not yet been revealed who will play McCurdy, but she will serve as showrunner. While hugely hyped, the show has also faced delays; it was reported late last year that it was left in limbo after the previous director Jason Reitman (Juno; Thank You For Smoking) exited at the eleventh hour.

“Here’s what I can say about the show…” McCurdy says. “I have such a clear vision for it and it’s so important to me that everybody on the team understands and is – speaking of alignment, here we go, it’s coming back – is aligned with that vision. That’s the most important thing to me.”

This seems to tally with reports that Reitman’s exit was due to “creative differences” over what the show’s tone should be. “That funny-sad thing is very easy to do in a flippant way and it’s really easy to do in a melodramatic way. This show is neither of those things. I know what this show is, and not only that, but I know what a deep connection so many people have to the book and I want to do right by them,” says McCurdy. “I want to make sure that by the time this is on the air, that it’s a show worth people’s time and so I’m not in any rush at all.”

open image in gallery

Is it a relief to have creative control? “Yeah. I feel I have so much creative control in so many aspects of my life,” she says simply. “That’s an imperative for me.”

Before we part ways I ask whether McCurdy, having written the book on age-gap relationships, can settle the perennial dinner debate: are they ever OK? She shoots me a knowing look, and a wry smirk. “It’s very personal,” she ventures carefully. “Each person knows in their gut what’s right or wrong. I truly believe there’s nothing more powerful than a woman’s intuition – I believe that in my core. So if you’re wondering, ‘Oh is this right? Is this not?’ Your gut knows.”

‘Half His Age’ is available to purchase now, published by HarperCollins