When Jennette McCurdy writes, she bares all. Her 2022 bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, gave a brutal but beautifully honest account of her childhood as a Nickelodeon TV star, a career spearheaded by an abusive mother who encouraged McCurdy to learn calorie restriction before she was a teen, which led to her developing bulimia.
Debra McCurdy gave her teenage daughter inappropriate physical examinations, and when McCurdy was 21, she passed away from breast cancer. McCurdy is not afraid to tell you any of it, and I valued her candour.
When I was 13, my mum was diagnosed with breast cancer and, overnight, I morphed myself into an adult. My mind told me that her health was my responsibility. My anxieties manifested themselves into a need for a set of good grades or being well-behaved, as this, to my adolescent rationale, could be the difference between a good medical appointment and a bad one. I needed her, and so I took it upon myself to save her.
Perhaps this is why when I read “the fragility of my mom’s life is the centre of mine” in McCurdy’s memoir decades later, it stopped me in my tracks. My feelings had been valid. My thoughts, to be expected.
Last September, my mum was re-diagnosed with breast and tonsil cancer and I found myself reaching for the memoir again, on the hunt for answers. It would be a lie to say it made me feel any better, but I found the same reassurance when I first read it.
Now, in her fiction debut, Half His Age, McCurdy writes with the same rawness and is equally as exposing. Set in Alaska, the novel’s protagonist is 17-year-old Waldo, and when we first meet her, she’s receiving oral sex.
Like most teenage girls, Waldo is moody, blunt and has desires that are ever-changing and insatiable. When she paints her face with makeup that wipes her bank account of the little funds her part-time job at Victoria’s Secret provides, she wants to feel womanly and not for it to sit awkwardly on her pores. She hates the popular girls at her school, yet wants to emulate them. But strongest of all is her desire for her 40-year-old creative writing teacher, Mr Korgy.
But why is Korgy such a catch? He’s married, has a son and has bills to pay. His passion for his job is long gone, along with his zest for life. His paunched belly protruding from under his button-up shirts and knit cardigans is hardly what most 17-year-olds find attractive, and yet, Waldo wants to be loved by him.
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What follows is an explicit, honest and fearless narrative that turns the expected dynamics of an age-gap relationship on its head. Korgy soon becomes infatuated by his student, yet importantly for McCurdy, it is Waldo who starts their affair.
“Ultimately, she is still 17. In whatever ways she pushes, asserts or inserts herself on to this person, into this dynamic, she’s 17,” McCurdy told Anna Martin on the New York Times’s Modern Love podcast. If Korgy had made the first move, it would’ve been an entirely different novel, one that was far easier to label. One that, McCurdy admits, would not be worth reading.
Half His Age is a reverse of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and a slight nod to Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa. Korgy mansplains highbrow films to Waldo that she has no interest in watching and patronisingly tells her that she needs to be reading David Foster Wallace and F Scott Fitzgerald.
The pair have performative-esque sex in his classroom store cupboard, his truck during her lunch breaks from her weekend job and even in his marital bed. The novel is crude. It embarrassed and angered me simultaneously. It made me want to cover my eyes with my hands and read through splayed fingers.
And it’s one of my favourite pieces of fiction I’ve ever read. This is because, for me, Half His Age’s most important relationship is not that of a student and teacher or even two lovers, but between Waldo and her female form.
McCurdy’s protagonist cannot trust what her body tells her. In one scene, she tries on a new off-the-shoulder top and smears the foundation she just bought on to her face. Away from the shop changing room, the top no longer suits her, and the makeup is “orange and patchy”. Then, her phone buzzes with a text from Korgy saying that he wants to see her and suddenly, the outfit doesn’t seem so bad. It’s been validated by the promise of male approval.
More poignantly, Waldo questions her libido when her body tells her she does not want to have sex with Korgy. She pushes away thoughts screaming at her that this is not what she wants, thinking to herself over and over again, “it’s only sex.” The problem is that it wasn’t just sex, it’s what the intimacy was communicating to Waldo, only she wasn’t ready to listen – yet.
“My body knows more than I do,” McCurdy writes of her protagonist. “My body’s instincts are loud. And they’re right. And they’re appropriate and reasonable and they are not a nuisance. They are giving me all the information I need.” It’s one of the most beautiful descriptions of the relationship women have with their bodies I have ever read.
I’m Glad My Mom Died told McCurdy’s truth and Half His Age encourages her readers to do the same. If brutal and unwavering honesty is what we can now expect from McCurdy, I’ll read it every time.
Eleanor Longman-Rood is digital editor of The New World
