Four star review, originally posted here on January 19th, 2025.
I believe this is the 3rd child star memoir I’ve read, and the 2nd where I’d never heard of the author before. I don’t know how I keep winding up reading these or what draws me in, but they’re always fascinating. At first this book wasn’t really speaking to me. It was fine, sounded like pretty much every other memoir out there, didn’t really seem to have much to say. But as I kept listening (memoirs are always best when listening to the author’s own voice, in my experience), I felt myself getting sucked in more. This book had a lot of obvious parallels to Corey Feldman’s memoir Coreyography. Both were child stars with abusive mothers who were surrounded by predatory perverts. But while Feldman’s traumatic experiences were full-on, horrifying, and obvious, McCurdy’s were more insidious. McCurdy had what she thought of as a loving mom. She and her mom were best friends who did everything together and cared deeply about one another (whereas Feldman’s mom was an absentee drug addict, if I recall correctly.) They were religious and family-oriented. But, with McCurdy’s shockingly effective title, she already lays the seeds in our minds that something just doesn’t seem quite right here. We see it in snippets here and there. A single violent outburst towards McCurdy’s father. A dismissal of anorexia worries from other parents. And, most disturbingly, a passing mention that McCurdy’s mother was still wiping her daughter’s butt at age 6, and showering her at age 16. We know that, eventually, McCurdy will realize how abusive this entire situation has been, because she put it right in the book title, and she’s bothering to write about it. But for the most part, the discussions of the mom are from young McCurdy’s perspective, and young McCurdy loved her mom. When McCurdy starts to spiral out of control as a young adult in the aftermath of her mother’s death, we the reader understand exactly why it’s happening. The eating disorders? The self-destructive behavior? The career she abhors? It’s all thanks to this shitty mom. But McCurdy’s in denial. To me, these later chapters, where McCurdy is trying to piece together her life and work through her shit, were the most compelling. I personally have a really hard time trying to understand eating disorders. It’s not that I do not believe that they are real, I just can’t relate to them. But McCurdy did such a great job explaining what the compulsions feel like that I finally felt like I understood it (as much as one can when one hasn’t been through it.)
Helga without the H 