Can Toxicity and Love Coexist? Dilemma of a Girl

What happens when a child’s deepest pain turns into a raw memoir? Jennette McCurdy’s ‘I’m Glad My Mom Died’ is a heartbreaking journey through the complex bond of motherhood, fame, and self-identity.

Key points:

Written by Jennette McCurdy

Genre: Memoir, Biography, Nonfiction

When I read the title, I was like “Huh?” When I finished the book, I was like “Hmm. Fair enough.”

On the cover, some comments were “hilarious,” “impressively funny,” and “an important cultural document.” I felt the book was a child’s rant about the suffocation she felt for most of her life.

Writing the book was perhaps her attempt to finally express hidden feelings. An unhealthy mother-daughter relationship, in an attempt to make her mother happy, caused her to lose her childhood desires and comfort, which pained me. In the name of “calorie restrictions,” her mother developed anorexia. Showering her until age sixteen, forcing her to act, sharing every single thing, leaving no privacy to a teenage girl, and leading to a dysfunctional lifestyle with eating disorders.

Relationships with parents are much more complex if not balanced and healthy. Think about a relationship where love is extreme; you are afraid to hurt the person, and at the same time, you feel like you're losing yourself, like sand slipping from your grip. That’s the kind of relationship Jennette McCurdy shared with her mother. I’m Glad My Mom Died book reflects that dysfunctional, unhealthy family bond and how that shaped her life. She was ashamed of her profession and media life and wanted to live like a little girl, living a normal life.

I felt like her mother’s cancer and other losses in life caused this desperation. She wanted to own her daughter and fulfill every wish she had for herself, forgetting that her daughter was an individual with her own desires and wishes.

“My anxiety causes me to be a people pleaser. My anxiety causes me to take the picture, sign my autograph, and say it’s a good one. But underneath that anxiety is a deep, unhealed combination of feelings that I fear to face. I fear that I’m bitter. I fear that I resent my mother. The person I have lived for. My idol. My role model. My one true love.”

The dilemma of love and hate here wrecked my heart, to be honest.

So many contradictions, thoughts, and internal fights are described in this book. The journey of Jennette McCurdy has taught me some valuable lessons indeed. Read the book, and you will learn that not everything that shines is necessarily gold. Beneath it, so many turmoils create lava and somehow break the inner soul.

You will not feel like reading a book; it’s written like a journal, personal thoughts.

If I am to find any fault in this, one would be: as a reader and not related to the entertainment industry, some detailed TV shows and how the industry works felt sometimes disconnected and lengthy.

Indelible mark on my mind:

✤ “I don’t like knowing people in the context of things. 'Oh, that’s the person I work out with. That’s the person I’m in a book club with. That’s the person I did that show with.' Because once the context ends, so does the friendship.”

✤ “I take a longer look at the words on her headstone.

Brave, kind, loyal, sweet, loving, graceful, strong, thoughtful, funny, genuine, hopeful, playful, insightful, and on and on…

Was she, though? Was she any of those things? The words make me angry. I can’t look at them any longer.

Why do we romanticize the dead? Why can’t we be honest about them?”

✤ “I feel like the world is divided into two types of people: people who know loss and people who don't.”

✤ “The problem with this is that if we beat ourselves up after a mistake, we add shame to the guilt and frustration that we already feel about our mistake. That guilt and frustration can be helpful in moving us forward, but shame...shame keeps us stuck. It's a paralyzing emotion. When we get caught in a shame spiral, we tend to make more of the same kinds of mistakes that caused us shame in the first place.”

✤ “She wanted this. And I wanted her to have it. I wanted her to be happy. But now that I have it, I realize that she’s happy and I’m not. Her happiness came at the cost of mine. I feel robbed and exploited.”

✤ “And if my entire life and point of view and identity have been built on a false foundation, confronting that false foundation would mean destroying and rebuilding a new foundation from the ground up. I have no idea how to go about doing this.”

✤ I would never admit this to Mom; I’ve only told her I’m devastated about being away from her, but I’m excited too. I feel guilty about that excitement.

✤ I know focusing on myself won’t be easy. It will take continuous effort, time, and attention. It will mean working on my issues, facing them head-on instead of letting them serve as distractions or trying to pretend they’re less than they are. It will mean doing THE WORK. The soul-scraping introspection it takes to understand where bad habits, insecurities, and self-sabotaging patterns come from and why.

✤ And then I realize that as much as I’m convinced that I need to quit these things—acting, alcohol, bulimia—I don’t think I can. As much as I resent them, in a strange way, they define me. They are my identity. Maybe that’s why I resent them.

One sentence from Jennette McCurdy’s doctor kept looping in my head: “Don’t Let Slips Become Slides.”

Do you have similar memoirs in your list? I would love to read those.

Let’s chat another day. 

Thanks

Jessie.