PDF Summary:I'm Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy

Have you ever wondered what goes on in the life of a child star? It’s not always glamorous, and in some instances, it’s downright toxic. In her best-selling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, former child star Jennette McCurdy explores the ways in which her acting career and her entire identity are inextricably linked with her difficult, often traumatic, relationship with her controlling mother.

In this guide, we’ll discuss the psychological research that both explains the behaviors McCurdy describes and details their effects, particularly on children. In addition, we’ll compare McCurdy’s narrative of her life to other popular books that take a clinical approach to similar issues, including Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Quit Like a Woman, and The Power of Vulnerability.

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Unfortunately, these parents’ behaviors have long-term, negative effects on their children. Studies show that these behaviors—often collectively called emotional abuse—are more likely to cause children Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) than any other form of childhood maltreatment.

Children of emotionally abusive parents grow up believing that their own interests, needs, and feelings don’t matter because their parent never acknowledged them. As psychologist Alice Miller explains in The Drama of the Gifted Child, these children learn to repress their intense feelings, much as McCurdy does when she starts to feel hatred toward her mom.

This repression leads to emotional insecurity and what Miller describes as the imprisonment of the true self within a false self. Children of narcissists become “people-pleasers,” deriving their identity from their ability to accommodate others, but never feeling good enough in their own right. Because they’re unable to feel genuine feelings, they often become depressed or grandiose. Through therapy, however, they can regain the ability to feel and discover their true selves.

McCurdy’s Eating Disorders and Drinking

Just as she controls McCurdy’s acting career, Debra also controls McCurdy’s eating, and she steers her into anorexia.

As a child, McCurdy is afraid to grow older because her mom wants her to stay young and small, in part because Debra thinks McCurdy can book more roles if she looks young for her age. When McCurdy is 11 and starts puberty, she asks her mom what she can do to stop developing, and her mom introduces her to what she calls “calorie restriction,” a form of extremely strict dieting.

McCurdy and her mom bond over their careful calorie counting and weekly weighing sessions (during which Debra also measures McCurdy’s thighs with a measuring tape). In six months, McCurdy drops three clothing sizes. Her doctor and others become concerned that she has anorexia. Debra lies to the doctor and says she hasn’t noticed any changes in McCurdy’s eating habits.

(Shortform note: Studies show that adolescents whose parents encourage them to diet are at a higher risk of being overweight or obese 15 years later; they also have a higher risk of binge eating, unhealthy weight control behavior, and poor body satisfaction. Restricting what or how much kids are allowed to eat can disrupt their natural hunger and fullness cues, making them more likely to engage in disordered eating later in life.)

McCurdy starts a music career as a teenager because her manager says that’s what all the child actors are doing. Right before she goes on a tour of American malls to promote her music, her mom’s cancer comes back, so Debra is unable to go with her. It’s the first time in McCurdy’s life that she experiences what it’s like to be away from her mom for more than a few hours. She notices that a lot of her anxiety disappears. Although she’s still nervous about her performances, she’s enjoying herself. She feels free and she starts eating a lot more. She realizes how exhausting it is to constantly monitor her mom and be exactly the way her mom wants her to be.

After the experience of being able to eat whatever she wants without worrying about what her mom will think, McCurdy starts binge eating frequently. She feels like her body is making up for having starved itself for so long.

(Shortform note: In Emotional Intelligence, psychologist Daniel Goleman says that eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia develop primarily due to an inability to tell the difference between negative emotions (sadness, anxiety, anger) and bodily impulses (hunger or lack of appetite). Children with eating disorders often have parents who ignore or dismiss their feelings. In addition, people are more likely to have eating disorders if their parents also had eating disorders. In McCurdy’s case, her mother appears to have had an eating disorder herself, and also to have directly introduced McCurdy to disordered eating. Eating disorders can cause serious health problems, depression and anxiety, and substance use disorders, among other life-threatening complications.)

McCurdy tries alcohol for the first time when she’s 21. She loves it because when she’s drunk, her inner critic—which is mostly the voice of her mom criticizing and judging her—is silenced. She proceeds to get very drunk every night for three weeks after she first tries alcohol.

On the day her mom dies, McCurdy binges on food and alcohol then forces herself to throw up. This is the beginning of McCurdy’s long battle with bulimia.

(Shortform note: Disordered drinking can stem in part from childhood pain and trauma. While alcoholism is sometimes seen as a lack of self-control or a genetic disorder, in reality, it’s a complex condition that can be influenced by a variety of factors including social, environmental, psychological, and genetic factors. In Quit Like a Woman, Holly Whitaker focuses on psychological pain as a cause of alcohol use disorder. She contends that alcoholism is caused by inner suffering that can arise when a person experiences trauma, has a difficult upbringing, is societally oppressed or marginalized, has mental health issues, or lacks a strong support network. This inner pain can cause a person to turn to an outside source like alcohol for the comfort and validation they’re unable to provide themselves.)

Lack of Emotional and Physical Boundaries Between Debra and McCurdy

McCurdy and her mom are so close that there are few emotional or physical boundaries between them. When teenaged McCurdy finally starts to assert some independence from her mom, Debra punishes her for it.

Debra doesn’t have many friends and, until McCurdy meets her co-star Miranda Cosgrove on iCarly, McCurdy doesn’t, either. When McCurdy is a young girl, Debra tells her repeatedly that she is her best friend and that she’d rather have McCurdy than any man. It makes McCurdy feel special to be so close to her mom.

Throughout McCurdy’s childhood—until she is 17—Debra showers with her. Sometimes Debra showers with both McCurdy and her brother Scottie, who is 16. This makes McCurdy and her brother extremely uncomfortable. Debra says she has to shower with her because she was trained as a hairstylist and only she knows how to properly shampoo and condition McCurdy’s hair.

(Shortform note: Although she doesn’t say in the book how old she was when Debra made her shower with Scottie, McCurdy has said in interviews that she was 11. While experts differ as to when parents should stop showering with their children, they agree that it’s no longer appropriate to do so if the children don’t want to, whether it’s because they feel uncomfortable or they simply want privacy. This often happens between the ages of three and eight years old.)

During the showers, Debra performs breast and vaginal “exams” on McCurdy. She says this is to check for cancer. McCurdy dissociates from her body when this is happening and thinks hard about Disneyland to remove herself mentally from her present reality. When the “exams” are over, McCurdy feels immense relief.

After Debra’s cancer comes back, she’s in a wheelchair and unable to drive McCurdy to the set of her show. McCurdy is 18 but Debra didn’t want her to learn to drive because she said her time would be better used doing other things, such as practicing lines. So she arranges for McCurdy to get her own apartment closer to the set. McCurdy is excited to finally be living on her own, but on her first night there, Debra invites herself over to spend the night—and never leaves. She sleeps in McCurdy’s bed with her; it’s hard for McCurdy to sleep because Debra clings to her all night.

One day, McCurdy lies to Debra that she’s having a sleepover with Miranda Cosgrove, whom she had grown close to, so she could spend the night with a man. Debra detects the lie and screams at McCurdy that she’s a dirty whore, throwing a remote control at her. McCurdy goes on to have a relationship with the man, but she keeps it secret from her mom.

When McCurdy and her boyfriend go on vacation to Hawaii together, McCurdy tells her mom that she’s with a gay friend (the only men Debra wants McCurdy to spend time with are Mormons and gay men). However, the paparazzi take photos of McCurdy and her boyfriend together. Upon seeing the shots in the news, Debra goes ballistic. She calls McCurdy about 100 times, leaving her voicemails, and sending her emails in which she tells McCurdy she’s a slut, evil, and a monster, and she also goes into detail about the sex she imagines McCurdy and her boyfriend are having. Debra goes so far as to post a note to McCurdy’s fan page about how awful she is. She accuses McCurdy of causing her cancer to come back and says that she and McCurdy’s brothers all disown McCurdy.

Emotional Abuse, Emotional Incest, and Sexual Abuse

As previously discussed, narcissistic and emotionally immature parents engage in emotional abuse of their children. This abuse can take many forms. In addition to manipulation, emotional outbursts, and shaming, emotional abuse can involve yelling and verbal aggression, constant criticism, isolation, passive aggression, excessive insults, and threats. Debra engages in many of these behaviors toward McCurdy.

One particularly insidious form of emotional abuse is emotional incest, sometimes also called emotional enmeshment or emotional parentification. Emotional incest occurs when a parent depends on a child to get their emotional needs met, treating the child like a surrogate spouse. The parent grooms the child to fulfill their needs and depends on the child for love and support, rather than the other way around. This creates a situation where there are very few boundaries between the parent and the child.

The relationship between Debra and McCurdy similarly lacks emotional—or physical—boundaries. Debra relies on McCurdy for her happiness and to fulfill her own dreams of becoming an actress. When McCurdy tries to assert her independence in any way (such as by living on her own, learning to drive, or dating someone), Debra thwarts or punishes her, sometimes violently. Debra physically imposes herself upon McCurdy and won’t allow her to perform even basic functions of living—showering and sleeping—without Debra right next to her, invading her privacy.

It’s unclear whether Debra’s behavior constitutes child sexual abuse, as this crime is generally defined as a form of child abuse in which a child is abused for the sexual gratification of the adult. However, McCurdy’s response to her mom’s invasive breast and vaginal exams—dissociating from her body and going somewhere else in her imagination—mirrors the response children (and adults) typically have to sexual abuse. Children experiencing sex abuse are essentially trapped, so their brains resort to dissociation as a survival mechanism to mentally “escape” the traumatic situation that would otherwise be unbearable. Regardless of the terminology used to describe Debra’s behavior, McCurdy describes its effects as highly traumatic.

Part 2: Debra’s Death

Debra dies when McCurdy is 21, leaving McCurdy feeling lost and unsure of who she is. In this section, we’ll discuss McCurdy’s initial reaction to Debra’s death, as well as the effect of Debra’s death on McCurdy’s acting career.

Debra’s Death Sends McCurdy Into a Tailspin

Jenette’s mom’s death causes her to stop caring about many things and feel angrier about others. She continues drinking and binging and purging. She exercises excessively: running 5-10 miles every other day and 13 miles twice a week. She feels bitter about things like her co-star, Ariana Grande’s, regular absences from the set in pursuit of her singing career. She loses her virginity to a man when she’s drunk just to get it over with, even though she doesn’t really want to have sex with him.

She also realizes that she’s spent her life focusing on her mom—trying to understand her and doing whatever it takes to make her happy—and has never focused on understanding or getting to know herself. She feels lost.

(Shortform note: Psychologists point out that children of narcissists can experience a kind of “double grief” upon the death of the narcissistic parent. They feel the ordinary grief of losing a parent, plus the additional grief of mourning the loss of the healthy, supportive parent-child relationship that they never had. This can cause different reactions in different people, but McCurdy’s response is a common one: anger and acting out as a type of regression to primal-level survival tactics.)

McCurdy Reconsiders Her Acting Career After Debra’s Death

After her mom dies, McCurdy is increasingly going through the motions at work. She hates the show she’s on (Sam & Cat, a spin-off of iCarly) and she hates acting. She agreed to the spin-off because her mom wanted her to do it and because the producers agreed that she could direct an episode. But the date on which she’s supposed to direct keeps getting pushed back until, with very few episodes left to go, it’s pushed off the calendar completely. She feels demoralized.

Later, she finds out that the show is being canceled. A manager tells her it’s because of a sexual harassment claim against one of the producers. McCurdy had her own experiences with this producer. For example, when she was younger, he pressured her to try alcohol for the first time. He also massaged her shoulders and placed his hand on her knee without her consent, and insisted that she wear a bikini for a scene in iCarly even though she felt uncomfortable doing so. Nickelodeon offers McCurdy $300,000 not to talk publicly about her experience with the network. She refuses to take what she considers to be hush money.

After she’s done a couple of seasons of a new show, she decides to take a break from acting. Acting makes her feel much the same way her eating disorder does: like she has no control over her life and is constantly bargaining to be good enough. She wants to take charge of her life, rather than allowing her eating disorder or her acting career to control her.

The Toll of Child Acting

Many child actors experience a similar loss of control as teenagers or adults, often resulting in public breakdowns or acting out. Experts and former child stars say there are a variety of reasons why child acting can take such a mental and emotional toll.

Like McCurdy, some child actors are pushed into acting by their parents, who want to live their lives through their child (and who may also be financially dependent on their child’s paycheck). In addition, having a job as a child is hard work. There can be a lot of pressure on child actors, especially those who are starring in a show: They need to learn their lines, work long hours, and live up to other people’s expectations of them—while also going to school. Finally, fame brings public scrutiny. Child actors don’t have a lot of free time or the opportunity to just be kids and make mistakes.

On the other hand, psychologists say that if the parents of child actors are able to maintain good boundaries and a sense of normalcy in their child’s life, the child is more likely to succeed later in life. Just as there are many examples of child actors turning to substance abuse or having meltdowns, there are child actors who have gone on to be successful as adult actors, or in other careers.

Part 3: McCurdy’s Recovery

After her mom’s death, McCurdy’s difficult childhood and its lasting, negative effects start to catch up to her, and she begins the process of recovery. In this section, we’ll first explore McCurdy’s experience with therapy and treatment for her eating disorders. Then, we’ll discuss how McCurdy comes to terms with Debra’s abuse.

Therapy and Treatment for Eating Disorders

Following her tailspin, McCurdy begins going to a therapist and life coach, Laura. They start by taking stock of McCurdy’s life, determining that she’s binging and purging 5-10 times a day and drinking 8-9 shots of hard alcohol a night. Laura helps McCurdy understand that she’s binging and purging as a way to relieve anxiety caused by pent-up emotions. McCurdy is so spent and exhausted after she purges that she has no energy left for anxiety. In this way, the act serves as self-medication. She learns that one method of addressing her bulimia is by journaling constantly to get her feelings on paper so they aren’t unconsciously propelling her actions.

In response to Laura’s questions, McCurdy reveals that her mom showed her how to restrict calories when she was 11. Laura says that McCurdy’s mom taught her how to be anorexic and encouraged her anorexia; she says this was abuse. McCurdy has always told herself that her mom wanted what was best for her, and she can’t stomach hearing her mom be called abusive. She quits therapy and returns to her disordered eating with a vengeance.

(Shortform note: Like McCurdy, many adult children of abusive parents have a hard time accepting that their parents were abusive. Some psychologists say this is due to a kind of twisted hope: Children of abusive parents have been conditioned to believe that if they just do everything the abusive parent wants and try harder to please them, eventually the parent will give them the love and support they need (and, illogically, sometimes this hope continues even after the parent’s death). It’s especially hard to recognize and come to terms with childhood abuse if it was primarily emotional—like Debra’s abuse of McCurdy—because this kind of abuse doesn’t cause obvious, physical harm. However, denial of a parent’s abuse doesn’t make the pain it caused go away. Only by facing the pain directly are children of abusive parents able to heal.)

Soon after McCurdy leaves therapy, her dad tells her that he’s not her biological father. Then, her boyfriend, who’s suddenly become religious despite previously showing no interest in religion, declares that he’s Jesus Christ reincarnated. McCurdy feels as if nothing in her life is certain or under her control. On a flight to Australia for a press junket, she binges and purges the entire time, and the last time, she loses a tooth in the process—her stomach acids had worn down the enamel. When she lands, she finds out her boyfriend is in a mental health facility and may be schizophrenic.

(Shortform note: McCurdy has said that she considers this sequence of events her “rock bottom”—a time when she didn’t believe things could get any better. The term “rock bottom” is frequently used in the recovery community to describe a crisis in a person’s life that makes them realize they don’t have any control over their addiction. Rock bottom looks different for everyone, and it isn’t necessary for people to hit rock bottom before they can begin their addiction recovery. However, for some people, like McCurdy, it’s what sets them on the path to recovery.)

Things have gotten so bad that she decides to see an eating disorder specialist, Jeff. He starts by having her eliminate any “dieting” behavior: She must get rid of all diet foods in her house and stop exercising, except for walking and stretching. Then she needs to track her eating and purging. Next, he has her attempt to eat three meals a day, with snacks in between. She starts making gradual progress.

One lesson she learns that hits home for her is the difference between a “slip” and a “slide.” A slip is when you slip up on your road to recovery and return to the behavior you’re trying to quit. You may feel guilt or frustration, which is normal and can even motivate you to change. A slide is when you add shame to those feelings of guilt and frustration, beating yourself up or telling yourself you’re a terrible person because you made a mistake. The problem with shame is it tends to spiral, often leading you to slip up more and more. Accepting that you’ll make mistakes on the road to recovery, without going into a “shame spiral” every time you do, can in fact make recovery more likely.

McCurdy struggles for years to recover from her eating disorder and has frequent relapses. However, using the techniques she’s learned, McCurdy eventually reaches a point where she’s able to go a year without purging, and she begins to enjoy eating.

Guilt, Shame, and Vulnerability

Recovery experts, psychologists, and even some religions have long emphasized the importance of knowing the difference between guilt and shame, or what McCurdy describes as the difference between a “slip” and a “slide.” In The Power of Vulnerability, researcher Brené Brown explains that guilt is about actions, while shame is about identity. Guilt makes you say, “I did a bad thing,” while shame makes you say, “I’m a bad person.” Shame can cause you to feel unworthy and unlovable, as well as to believe that you’re all alone with your problems, which can in turn lead you to engage in more unhealthy behavior. Brown notes that shame is highly correlated with addiction, eating disorders, depression, and violence. It’s often caused by negative interactions with authority figures in childhood.

The antidotes to shame, says Brown, are vulnerability, empathy, and self-compassion. Talking about your shame with a trusted confidant helps you understand that you’re not alone, and learning to understand other people’s feelings helps them dispel their own shame. Self-compassion—being kind to yourself when you make a mistake—helps you learn from your mistakes without connecting them to your self-worth.

A lesson on the toxic effects of shame is also present in the Buddhist metaphor of the “two arrows.” The first arrow is the emotional or physical pain you experience when you make a mistake or something bad happens to you. The second arrow is the additional mental suffering your thoughts create, which can lead you to shame yourself, blame others, and engage in unhealthy behaviors to distract yourself from the pain.

The solution, according to Buddhism, is to sit with the uncomfortable feelings caused by the first arrow, rather than immediately shooting yourself with the second arrow of your thoughts. A more colloquial description of this process sometimes used in the recovery community is “The only way out is through.” The Buddhist approach also emphasizes self-compassion, encouraging you not to beat yourself up when you make a mistake.

Coming to Terms With Debra’s Abuse

McCurdy visits Debra’s grave regularly after she dies, but as the years pass, she visits less and less frequently. On one of her visits, McCurdy notes all of the superlative adjectives the family had placed on her gravestone and reflects on how she always believed her mom was all of these and more—a kind of goddess who could do no wrong. But now she recognizes the truth: Her mom was a narcissist who emotionally, mentally, and physically abused her.

McCurdy catalogs some of the ways that Debra hurt her:

• Debra gave McCurdy breast and vaginal exams until McCurdy was 17. McCurdy felt violated, but her mom had taught her that she didn’t have the option of saying “no” to anything her mom thought was best.
• When McCurdy was only 6, Debra forced her into a career that McCurdy didn’t want. She never had a chance to be a child.
• When McCurdy was 11, Debra taught her an eating disorder.
• Debra lied to her about who her father was, and never told her about her biological father.

Despite the abuse, McCurdy still misses her mom and reflects fondly on some aspects of her personality. Sometimes she imagines that if her mom were still alive, she would have apologized for her actions, and the two could have a healthy relationship.

But then McCurdy realizes that this is just a fantasy. She knows that her mom never acknowledged her issues or made any effort to change during her lifetime, even though her behavior was harming her family. McCurdy knows that if Debra were still alive, she’d still be trying to manipulate McCurdy into doing and being exactly what Debra wanted, she’d still be encouraging McCurdy’s eating disorder, and she’d still be pushing McCurdy to continue in an acting career that makes McCurdy miserable. McCurdy gets up from Debra’s grave and walks away, knowing that she’ll never come back.

Healing From an Abusive Parent

Although “I’m Glad My Mom Died” is a provocative title, McCurdy has said in interviews that she didn’t mean it flippantly. She’s said that she believes people who’ve experienced parental abuse will understand the title, and she hopes that the title will make more sense to readers once they’ve heard her life story.

Psychological research supports McCurdy’s belief that if Debra were still alive, she’d still be controlling and abusing her daughter. Narcissistic and abusive parents tend to get worse, rather than better, with age, as the normal problems of aging (their own and their children’s) compound some of their abusive behaviors. In addition, people with narcissistic personality disorder are frequently resistant to changing their behavior. To address their narcissism, they have to want to change as well as be willing to do the work in therapy to make changes.

In fact, many therapists point out that because it can be very difficult to have a healthy relationship with an abusive parent, often the best option for adult children of toxic parents is to limit contact (by seeing less of a parent or by setting clear boundaries about what is and isn’t acceptable behavior) or to cut off contact completely. Psychological or physical distance from the abusive parent can be necessary to allow the child the space to heal and focus on their own needs, rather than focusing exclusively on the parent’s needs. As a result, some children of toxic parents don’t have any relationship with their parent, even if the parent is still alive.