Three million copies sold — and the audiobook narrated by McCurdy herself is the only way to experience it.
Jennette McCurdy spent her childhood acting because her mother needed her to. She went along with what her mother called calorie restriction. She was showered by her mother until she was sixteen. She became famous on iCarly and Sam and Cat, and spent those years in escalating anxiety, eating disorders, and dependence. When her mother died of cancer, McCurdy felt something she did not expect: relief. This memoir is her account of why, written with dark humor and the unflinching specificity that distinguishes exceptional memoir from celebrity confession. It won the 2022 Goodreads Choice Award for memoir, spent more than eighty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and sold over three million copies.
McCurdy narrates her own work with the precision of a writer who knows exactly what effect she intended and a performer who knows exactly how to land it. The humor — and there is a great deal of genuine humor here, which is part of what makes the book remarkable — lands differently in her voice than it would in a stranger's. The grief does too. The eating disorder sections are handled with care and without glamorization. At six and a half hours, it is the kind of listen that people finish in a single day and then sit with for a week.
Essential for anyone who has experienced an enmeshed or controlling parental relationship and struggled to name what was wrong with it. Also important for people-pleasers, those in recovery from disordered eating or addiction, and anyone who has ever achieved something that made someone else happy while making themselves miserable. The dark humor makes it broadly accessible.
Approach with care if you are in early recovery from an eating disorder — the book does not shy away from specific behaviors and numbers, and McCurdy herself has noted this. Not a comfortable listen, though it is ultimately a hopeful one.
Listen to it. Three million readers have already made this call. McCurdy narrating her own story is not an audiobook; it is a performance of the memoir, and the distinction matters.