I'm Glad My Mom Died
Written by Jennette McCurdy
Originally published in 2022
About 300 pages
Rate 5/5
I'd seen this book on Instagram so much when it first came out and thought, "wow that's a really bold title, I should read that." However, I saw that it was nearly $30 and thought, "damn, nevermind." Thankfully, my cousins were gifted two copies of the book and were kind enough to give me one of their copies.
What is I'm Glad My Mom Died about?
This is a memoir about not only Jennette's awful relationship with her mom, but the unhealthy habits that formed because of their dynamics. Jennette didn't want to act, her mom wanted to live vicariously through her before she was even eight years old. She only ever wanted to make her mom proud, but that was a very difficult thing to do. And so, she developed an eating disorder and an addiction to alcohol.
This is a story about realized the difficult truth, sometimes the people you were born to love and care about don't love or care about you.
My thoughts on I'm Glad My Mom Died
This was one of the best memoirs I have read (this is the only memoir I have read). The story was very engrossing despite her choppy sentences. I didn't realize that she grew up Mormon and I didn't know how present that aspect of her life would have been in the book. Despite the amount of terribleness within her life, it was really interesting reading about it. I can't say I completely related to her story, but sometimes her thought process felt all too familiar.
Quotes
"Mom only sits in when I'm being the thing she wanted me to be." (48)
"I wish I could stop time. I wish I could stay a child. I feel guilty that I can't. I feel guilty with every inch I grow. I feel guilty whenever we see one of my aunts or uncles and they comment on how much I'm "growing up." I can see Mom's eyebrow twitch whenever they say that. I can see how much it pains her." (89)
"I'm tired of people approaching me like they own me. Like I owe them something. I didn't choose this life. Mom did." (120)
"And little by little, you realize you start talking less and less to the people you thought you were so intimate with. Until you don't talk to them at all anymore. And it makes you wonder if you were ever really intimate with them in the first place or if it was all just a façade. If the connections were as temporary as the sets they were made on." (166)
"I've pretended to be other people my whole life, my whole childhood and adolescence and young adulthood. The years that you're supposed to spend finding yourself, I was spending pretending to be other people. The years that you're supposed to spend building character, I was spending building character." (230)