Jennette McCurdy was a child star on a Nickelodeon show I've never watched, but nevertheless I found her memoir, I'm Glad My Mom Died, insightful and terrifying and funny all at the same time for its compelling portrayal of her controlling stage mom, her battle with eating disorders, and her life as a child star. She puts the cost of stardom into perspective here:
It doesn't help that I'm famous for a thing I started when I was a kid. I think of what it would be like if everyone was famous for a thing they did when they were thirteen: their middle school band, their seventh-grade science project, their eighth-grade play. The middle school years are the years to stumble, fall, and tuck under the rug as you're done with them because you've already outgrown them by the time you're fifteen.
But not for me. I'm cemented in people's minds as the person I was when I was a kid.
As I said: horrifying. I quit playing the flute following the fiasco of my seventh-grade marching band season and I shudder to imagine being stuck in that wretched scratchy wool uniform forever, desperately struggling to march intricate formations while playing the right notes on my flute but knowing that I could accomplish only one of those two goals at any given moment. Don't even get me started about the fire ants on the practice field. I've successfully swept those memories under the rug and I would not care to carry them around with me everywhere.
So I have some sympathy for the child star "cemented in people's minds" as a 13-year-old, and her book is a brisk and often comical variation on the tear-off-the-bandaid memoir, full of grotesque details but never maudlin. I've never seen her act, but I believe her when she says she's rather write than act; her long-thwarted passion throbs through the book and made me want to keep reading long after she'd finally left behind her eighth-grade self.
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