This work page was initially cut for Real Life troping. This sandbox is intended to remake it with "the memoir frames it as..." phrasing and will be presented to relevant cleanup threads before publishing -Synchronicity
I'm Glad My Mom Died is a 2022 memoir by Jennette McCurdy. The memoir is told in a series of vignettes depicting events from McCurdy's life and is divided in two parts: "Before" details her complicated relationship with her mother and how it shaped her acting career, from bit parts as a child actor to her big break on iCarly to her mother's eventual death from breast cancer in 2013; "After" tells us about McCurdy's healing process in the aftermath.
Tropes:
- Accidental Misnaming: Jennette claims that, once when she was a child, her own dad spelled her name wrong on a birthday card. She says that although people spell her name wrong all the time and it doesn't usually bug her, that time it made her sad.
- Contractual Purity: Discussed in chapter 34. McCurdy talks about how difficult it is for child actors to transition to legitimate 'adult' acting careers, especially if they came from the "glossy" (as she calls it) world of kid's television. Their every action is scrutinized and they are judged for any inkling of rebellion.
- Establishing Series Moment: The book's tone and theme is established thus: while her mother Debra is in a coma, McCurdy thinks telling her how skinny she currently is will wake her mother up. Later in the book McCurdy describes the beginnings of her long battle with eating disorders: at the onset of her puberty, she was gripped with a desire to remain small and young for the sake of her acting career, and Debra encouraged severe caloric restriction.
- Hollywood Homely: Discussed In-Universe. Because she was acting from such a young age, McCurdy learned to see herself on a casting director's scale of beauty — she was considered too homely to play an 'ethereal' beauty, but too pretty to play an androgyne.
- Hot-Blooded: Jennette's grandmother falls into this; early in the memoir, she yells at a young Jennette, "Why do you hate me?" for simply asking her to get off the phone.
- I Am Not My Mother: On Jennette's twenty-sixth birthday, she's made progress with her eating disorder recovery, but still struggles often. On her and Miranda Cosgrove's trip to Disneyland, she purges secretly, which causes her to reflect on her mother. Jennette bluntly states that she doesn't want to become her.Jennette: Mom didn't get better. But I will.
- Iconic Item: McCurdy briefly discusses her character Sam Puckett's "butter sock" and how it became so associated with her that strangers would call it out to her on the street.
- Mood-Swinger: Debra is described as having very violent mood swings – including attempting to physically assault her husband and sending Jennette over-the-top, angry emails over perceived insubordination. Her state of mind is never quite framed as being sound. Whether she suffers from a mood disorder or a more severe personality disorder, diagnosis (or, more crucially, treatment) is never mentioned.
- Stage Mom: McCurdy frames her mother as Vicariously Ambitious and overly invested when it came to her acting career. According to her, Debra McCurdy was more present in auditions (at one point muscling her way into an audition screening that parents weren't allowed into) than all other parents and had a much more obvious presence on set.
- The Topic of Cancer: McCurdy describes several incidents where her mother (when her breast cancer was in remission) would play the "cancer card" , knowing it would net them points with people in the industry - for example, she would encourage Jennette to work the information into her auditions.
- Vicariously Ambitious: By narrating an incident where Debra tells her daughter Jennette that Debra's parents wouldn't let her become an actress and following it up with Debra asking Jennette if she wanted to act, the memoir implies that Debra pushed Jennette into acting because of her own unfulfilled dreams. After Jennette achieves fame with iCarly she more clearly sees that fame made her unhappy, but made Debra very happy.
