Childhood stardom and the spectre of the “stage mom” are the focus of a US summer publishing sensation that – in short, punchy sentences delivered with a high level of self-perception – could transform the trauma memoir business.
Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died has sold around 200,000 copies since its release less than two weeks ago, according to publisher Simon & Schuster. It has also triggered a wave of fan activism and propelled the author to a different kind of fame from the one she inhabited in Nickelodeon’s iCarly and then its spin-off, Sam and Cat, which also starred Ariana Grande.
McCurdy, now 30, recounts how, aged eight, she was pushed into acting, encouraged to restrict her eating to prevent her breasts from getting bigger, and singled out as her family’s breadwinner by her obsessive mother who controlled her life and career, leading to anxiety and self-loathing that played out in unhealthy ways.
McCurdy claims she was subjected to misconduct and manipulation at the hands of a man identified only as “The Creator”, believed to be among Nickelodeon’s production staff.
“No child is psychologically, emotionally, mentally equipped for the obstacles of child stardom,” McCurdy told Canada’s CBC last week. “Even if they have the greatest support system around them.”
The child actors, she claims, were pitted against each other. She was encouraged to drink alcohol, yelled at while filming her first kiss, given borderline-appropriate massages, then claims she was offered money not to speak out.
“Nickelodeon is offering me $300,000 in hush money to not talk publicly about my experience on the show?” McCurdy writes in her book. “This is a network with shows made for children. Shouldn’t they have some sort of moral compass?”
Dan Schneider, producer of many of Nickelodeon’s hit shows, left the company in 2018. He has denied all claims of inappropriate behaviour.
“If this blows up any more than it already has, Nickelodeon and the entire industry of child acting may finally land itself a #MeToo reckoning,” Slate magazine predicted on Friday.
McCurdy, who left acting in 2014, may turn out to be among the luckier child stars who have attempted to bridge their careers into adulthood and found the transition, or the public’s expectations of them, insupportable.
The parallel theme, and one that drives McCurdy’s account, is her relationship with her mother, Debra, who pushed her into acting at the age of six. The pair bonded over shared eating disorders. But when the child star told her mother that she didn’t want to act any more, Debra became hysterical and burst into tears. “You can’t quit! This was our chance! This was ouuuuur chaaaaance!” her mother yelled.
In 2013, Debra died from cancer. “I don’t know who I am without her because I was living for her, and now she’s dead,” McCurdy told Canada’s CBC this week.
“I couldn’t face this at the time, but there was some relief there.”
But the book, and the reception it has received, could return the focus of the trauma narratives to the mother and create new demand for mother-daughter accounts.
“The public zeitgeist may have turned,” says Michael Kinsey at Black Cat Books on New York’s Shelter Island. “From a publisher’s point of view, this will now become its own subgenre. Trust me, when there’s one hit, another publisher has another version of the same story ready to go.”
Black Cat sales assistant Tatum Kosow, 19, an iCarly and Sam and Cat fan a decade ago, said: “It’s harder to read about a mother and daughter because mums are supposed to be maternal. The abuse feels psychological.”
According to psychoanalyst Dr Jamieson Webster the return to a focus on the mother may correspond to a waning of the patriarchy. “It throws you back on the question of the maternal and it’s not necessarily a nice place either,” she said.
“It’s not like you go from worse to something better; it’s like you go from worse to even worse, or that’s the way Lacan put it,” she said, referring to Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst who wrote The Father Or Worse. “The mother who uses her daughter for money and fame. How can a child really say what they want? So we’re back to blaming the mum, but that’s not going to get us anywhere.”
