{"id":270911,"date":"2026-01-29T23:12:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-29T23:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/270911\/"},"modified":"2026-01-29T23:12:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T23:12:09","slug":"darkly-comic-tale-of-a-high-schoolers-illicit-affair-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/270911\/","title":{"rendered":"Darkly comic tale of a high-schooler\u2019s illicit affair \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Half His Age <\/p>\n

Author: Jennette McCurdy <\/p>\n

ISBN-13: 978-0008617691<\/p>\n

Publisher: Fourth Estate <\/p>\n

Guideline Price: \u00a3 16.99<\/p>\n

Former tween idol Jennette McCurdy knows how to get laughs \u2013 and how to use them. A child actor turned memoirist, she\u2019s built a career grinding pain into punchlines. <\/p>\n

Her first nonfiction book I\u2019m Glad My Mom Died sold more than three million copies worldwide and stayed on The New York Times<\/a> hardcover list for 60 weeks when it was first published in 2022. On its blush-pink cover, McCurdy smiles faintly, holding an urn filled with confetti. <\/p>\n

Half His Age is her debut novel. It\u2019s set in Anchorage, Alaska<\/a>. Our narrator, a 17-year-old girl named Waldo, is a high-school student and a part-time employee at Victoria\u2019s Secret<\/a>. She has an absent father and an emotionally unstable mother who forgets to pay the bills. <\/p>\n

She self-describes as \u201cfrom a white trash trailer park\u201d. She has a Mormon best friend who has trouble pronouncing words that end in \u201c-ing\u201d. This friend \u2013 along with many others \u2013 is displeased to learn that Waldo is having an affair with her creative writing teacher. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0I\u2019m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy: a startlingly impressive, assured, and funny memoirOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

In one of her poems, Waldo defines herself as \u201ca regret\u201d. From this vantage point, anything is possible and nothing is; she has been doomed from the start. Generally, she is drawn to her teacher because he listens to her and affirms her talent. Specifically, she is drawn to her teacher because, for a couple of moments, he is able to engage her more effectively than her social media feed. <\/p>\n

The writer Naomi Wolf once wrote that the media has co-opted young people\u2019s sexuality so thoroughly as to make Freud irrelevant. This doesn\u2019t entirely bear out in the novel, but it is worth mentioning that McCurdy\u2019s narrator seems far more aroused by online shopping than by sex. To clear her head, she clears her cart. Despite her attempts, \u201cNo matter how much spit … how much dry-humping or making out … petting or edging … sex always falls short. Feels clunky and perfunctory.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rest of the novel charts Waldo\u2019s ambivalence about her relationship. Along the way, McCurdy resists many gestures of trauma plot that have come to define MeToo-era fiction. The novel\u2019s biggest strength is its deadpan, Bret-Easton-Ellis-adjacent ability to use comedy to get at \u201cthe absolute banality\u201d of sexual objectification. Its biggest weakness is that it doesn\u2019t have much else to offer.<\/p>\n

Kristen Malone Poli is a PhD student in literary practice at Trinity College Dublin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Half His Age Author: Jennette McCurdy ISBN-13: 978-0008617691 Publisher: Fourth Estate Guideline Price: \u00a3 16.99 Former tween idol…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":270912,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[6489,93,61,60,12167,115,95917,42415],"class_list":["post-270911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-book-reviews","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-new-york-times","tag-united-states","tag-victoria-s-secret","tag-your-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}