Jennette McCurdy

American actress and author whose memoir I'm Glad My Mom Died is a raw, darkly funny account of childhood stardom, an eating disorder, and a controlling, enmeshed mother.

Jennette McCurdy is best known as Sam Puckett from the Nickelodeon shows iCarly and Sam & Cat, a career she began at age six at her mother’s insistence and continued for most of her adolescence and young adult life. I’m Glad My Mom Died, published in 2022, is her account of that career and the psychologically abusive relationship with her mother that shaped it — including a severe eating disorder that her mother encouraged and that McCurdy struggled with for years. The title, confrontational and deliberately shocking, captures the book’s core argument: that her mother’s death was, alongside being devastating, also a form of release.

The memoir is remarkable for several reasons, starting with its voice. McCurdy writes in short chapters with tight, precisely timed prose that is often painfully funny. She deploys dark humor not as a defense mechanism but as a tool for precision — it allows her to describe experiences that resist conventional emotional register without minimizing them. The book never asks for the reader’s sympathy, which paradoxically makes it easier to give.

I’m Glad My Mom Died is also one of the more searching accounts of the harm the entertainment industry causes to child performers, and of how institutional systems around child actors can enable rather than protect against abuse. McCurdy writes about Nickelodeon’s dynamics with the same unflinching specificity she brings to her family. For a first book, it is exceptionally assured.