{"id":243127,"date":"2026-01-20T20:53:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T20:53:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/243127\/"},"modified":"2026-01-20T20:53:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T20:53:08","slug":"jennette-mccurdy-on-her-debut-novel-half-his-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/243127\/","title":{"rendered":"Jennette McCurdy on Her Debut Novel ‘Half His Age’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJennette McCurdy isn\u2019t ashamed to admit that comfort is a huge part of her life right now.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn her work, the former child star and New York Times bestselling author of the no-holds-barred 2022 memoir I\u2019m Glad My Mom Died can be blunt and unsparing; but outside of it, she\u2019s all about the warm and cozy. \u201cI have a heating pad on my lap, my green juice, my water bottle, and my Christmas mug of coffee,\u201d McCurdy says from her Southern California home, pulling her camera down to give a panoramic view of her desk. \u201cI love a multibeverage situation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s been three years since McCurdy\u2019s memoir cast a sharp eye on her life as a child actor \u2014 she\u2019s best known for playing tough girl Samantha Puckett on the Nickelodeon sitcom iCarly \u2014 with a controlling, abusive mother. The book was a commercial and critical success and is in the process of being adapted for an Apple TV series starring Jennifer Aniston<\/a> as her mother, with McCurdy attached as a writer. Following its release, McCurdy became a vocal critic of how Hollywood treats and disposes of child actors, noting how a manipulative system drove her to mental health issues and an eating disorder. And while comfort might be an inextricable part of her writing process, she\u2019s doubling down on works that might make readers uncomfortable: This week sees the release of McCurdy\u2019s debut novel, Half His Age<\/a>, a story about a teenage girl and her transformative affair with her high school English teacher, a relationship that explores the permissible boundaries of desire and rage for both its main characters and the readers who open its pages.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFemale rage is something we\u2019re not given permission to talk about enough. We\u2019re told to stuff it down, keep it down, keep the smile on,\u201d McCurdy says. \u201cI wrote this book because I had so much unprocessed rage about aspects of my own life and my own personal relationships and story. This was a way for me to process some of that,\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHalf His Age drops readers in the world and psyche of 17-year-old Waldo, an Alaska teen who lives in a trailer park and has an addiction to online shopping. But her entirely unsatisfying life takes a turn when she develops a sudden, almost epiphanic sexual attraction to her middle-aged teacher, Mr. Korgy. As she pursues a secret relationship with him, her wants, desires, and dreams about the future collide in a desperate mess. Half His Age is not an easy read or a particularly pleasant one, between Mr. Korgy\u2019s clumsy sexual proddings and Waldo\u2019s naive fumblings toward a sexually liberated adult life. But McCurdy tells Rolling Stone the novel is a fictional expression of some of the general frustration and anger she felt herself as a teen.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201c[Waldo] is brimming with desire and dissatisfaction. There\u2019s no time where desire is more potent than when you\u2019re 17 years old,\u201d McCurdy says. \u201cYou\u2019ve got your raging hormones. The world is so big and also can feel so small. And as a result of all of that, I think you\u2019re just desperate for what else is out there, for more, for identity.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMcCurdy considered herself a writer long before I\u2019m Glad My Mom Died ever hit shelves; after she stopped acting at 20, she dove into writing as an outlet for self-expression. Half His Age came to her as an idea while taking one of her first solo trips to Japan, nearly four years later. \u201cI\u2019m only putting this together now, but maybe there was a sense of independence and freedom that I felt on that trip,\u201d she says. \u201cI wanted to capture the opposite.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile the novel\u2019s narrative engine is the incredibly inappropriate age-gap relationship, the book\u2019s most incisive commentary revolves around Waldo\u2019s inability to stop online shopping during bouts of intense emotion. There are lengthy, detailed passages about flimsy fast-fashion dresses and skincare products Waldo purchases in manic or fugue states, only to rip into them later and find cheap facsimiles of the things that previously caused her to be on edge. Waldo\u2019s digital shopping cart \u2014\u00a0and McCurdy\u2019s brusque descriptions of her late-night binges \u2014 highlight the gaping, cavernous maw of her wants. And it makes her sexual interest in her married fortysomething teacher the least interesting thing about her. It\u2019s a hidden truth McCurdy sees all around her: the secret desires of shoppers. \u201cI have such a vivid memory of walking past a Victoria\u2019s Secret and thinking about what these items represent,\u201d McCurdy says. \u201cThat woman does not want a push-up bra, she wants to stop aging. That woman does not want a thong, she wants to feel desired by her husband of 30 years. The deeper want underneath is so much more interesting.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile McCurdy is open about the life experiences that make up her memoir, and the feelings that inspired her debut novel, the personal nature of the stories also mean she\u2019s not willing to give up authority over how other versions of those narratives take shape. The book hasn\u2019t been optioned yet, but she\u2019s already finished adapting Half His Age into a screenplay and wants to direct it. The release date for Apple\u2019s adaptation of \u00a0I\u2019m Glad My Mom Died, meanwhile, is up in the air following the departure of director Jason Reitman. McCurdy declined to comment on behind-the-scenes matters but stressed that she\u2019s focused on maintaining creative control.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cVision is a thing that can be really easy to get lost [and] misconstrued. My voice has got a very specific tone, which I think of as \u2018funny-sad.\u2019And it\u2019s really easy to make things that are \u2018funny sad\u2019 flippant and melodramatic,\u201d McCurdy says. \u201cHaving authority is what I feel from writing. Having power is what I feel from writing. And it\u2019s so important to me that I protect my vision for projects at all costs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tIf I\u2019m Glad My Mom Died was a blunt confessional, then Half His Age is a fictional revenge story, one where McCurdy excavates emotions she herself had at 17. And if it makes you angry, about feminism or rampant consumerism or the power dynamics in age-gap relationships, even better \u2014 McCurdy still is, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis [book] is for women with unprocessed rage. As a person who grew up a chronic people pleaser, I really could not accept my own anger. Anytime I get in touch with my anger, it leads me to a better path,\u201d she says, adding, \u201cIt\u2019s for the girls and the gays. I don\u2019t need a single straight man to pick this up.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jennette McCurdy isn\u2019t ashamed to admit that comfort is a huge part of her life right now.\u00a0 In…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":243128,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[18997,489,430,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-243127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-appletv","tag-books","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243127\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}