Jennette McCurdy 2-Book Collection Set: Half His Age & I'm Glad My Mom Died Review: A Powerful Pairing of Raw, Unflinching Voices

The set brings together two distinct works. I'm Glad My Mom Died is a memoir, first published in 2022, in which McCurdy recounts her childhood as a Nickelodeon child actor raised by her mother Debra, whom McCurdy describes as having narcissistic personality disorder. The book covers sexual abuse McCurdy suffered, her mother's role in the development of her eating disorder, and the broader realities of growing up inside a system of generational trauma. Half His Age, published by Ballantine Books on January 20, 2026, is McCurdy's fiction debut: a novel following Waldo, a 17-year-old high school senior in Anchorage, Alaska, who becomes involved in a sexual relationship with her creative writing teacher, Mr. Korgy. McCurdy signed both books under a two-book, seven-figure deal with Ballantine, reported by Publishers Weekly in 2022.

When I'm Glad My Mom Died arrived in 2022, its impact was immediate and outsized. The Guardian described it as having "lit a touchpaper to a nascent cultural conversation," introducing Debra's narcissistic personality disorder to a public increasingly ready to discuss adult child and parent estrangement. Writing in critical coverage, the memoir was called "a staggering thing, a cleareyed account of her childhood as a Nickelodeon TV star with an abusive stage mom that is somehow both haunting, tender and funny." The book was a bestseller — a significant step for a former child performer who had been, as The Guardian put it, "the funny one" on Nickelodeon. That cultural weight gives the collection its gravity: the memoir is not simply a companion piece but the foundation on which McCurdy's entire literary identity rests.

Half His Age picks up McCurdy's central preoccupations in fictional form. McCurdy has described it as an exploration of female rage, power, and desire, and has said in interviews that an age-gap relationship she experienced at 18 served as a "jumping-off point," though she has been explicit that the novel is not autobiographical. Waldo is rendered as a young woman whose dissociation and emotional detachment — she "play-acts through sexual encounters and disassociates at the school disco," per The Guardian — are shown to be the direct inheritance of her mother's instability. The mother-daughter dynamic shifts, as The Guardian notes, "uneasily between friends, siblings and caretaker." McCurdy has said she deliberately avoided a moralistic framing, having Waldo initiate the relationship and depicting her as "aggressive" and "bold," and she revised early drafts in which Mr. Korgy read as "too villainous" in order to preserve believability. The discomfort readers experience is, by McCurdy's own account, a designed effect rather than an oversight.

The Guardian's review of Half His Age identifies genuine craft in McCurdy's dark comic register, noting "solid one-liners that feel straight out of a sitcom writers' room" alongside a final sequence that "tone-shifts effortlessly from body horror to French farce." The novel's depiction of Waldo's coping mechanisms — an online shopping compulsion rendered in staccato prose — channels the emotional emptiness at the book's core with precision. Across both works, McCurdy's willingness to resist tidying or moralizing is a consistent strength. She has described unprocessed anger from her own past as an emotional driver behind Half His Age, and that rawness distinguishes both books from more sanitized treatments of similar subject matter. Half His Age debuted at number two on the Publishers Weekly bestseller lists, selling 30,761 units in its first week, confirming that the readership built by the memoir followed McCurdy into fiction.

The collection is rated for readers 18 and up, a designation that signals the frank and at times graphic nature of the material in both books. Vulture critic Fran Hoepfner, as noted in Wikipedia's reception summary, wrote that while McCurdy gives Waldo "depth and contradiction," the novel can fall back on repetitive sex scenes and shock value — a critique that suggests readers seeking varied dramatic tension across Half His Age's full arc may find the pacing uneven. The set is designed for readers already invested in McCurdy's voice and worldview; those coming cold to either title hoping for a gentler entry point will find neither book accommodating. The pairing works best as a deliberate deep-dive into a single authorial sensibility rather than as a casual introduction to either genre.