A review by knkoch
I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

challenging emotional funny hopeful reflective medium-paced

4.75

I'm really impressed by this. It was recommended to me for its shorter length and straightforward chapter structure because I've been struggling with staying engaged with audiobooks. This succeeded not only on those merits, but on many others, like voice, specificity, clarity, arc, and general writing quality. I wasn't expecting McCurdy to have such a strong writing style; I expected that she had a big story to tell, but so often in these sorts of celebrity memoirs, the story is more valuable than the way it's told. But she handles her story so deftly, especially as she writes about her early acting career starting at six years old. It's hard, as an adult, to reflect on your childhood without imposing your adult mindset, contemporary hindsight, and judgement on those reflections. McCurdy writes her younger self with such credulity, faithfully recording the way abuse warps your psychology to accept and understand your situation as normal when outside observers would see anything but. I felt that impact doubly as I listened to McCurdy herself narrate her book. It's powerful; this is one of the first books I've come across that I'd recommend as audio over print. 

I also found McCurdy's dark, dry sense of humor interesting, and it began to feel like the glimmers of her independent selfhood shining through the misery and control imposed on her by her mother and, eventually, the television industry as a whole. Celebrity authors bring so much name recognition from their other career work that I don't tend to automatically trust their books as deserving of the hype they ride on. There has to be real substance there, not just a famous name. This book proved something to me, and demonstrated such substance. I heard that McCurdy is working on a novel, and based on her writing here, I will keep an eye out for it. 
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