According to the Guardian, the 2020 book My Dark Vanessa — about an inappropriate teenage student-middle-aged teacher relationship — reflected the contemporary zeitgeist, where “earlier sexual mores [were] being re-evaluated and clearer boundaries laid down”. Six years later, Jennette McCurdy’s novel Half His Age shows that, whatever re-evaluations have been happening, warped power dynamics along gender and age metrics remain a hot subject.
The book is based on a relationship McCurdy, a former Disney child star, had as a teenager with a man in his mid-thirties whom she met on set. He played her music and showed her films that she only pretended to like, and pushed herself beyond her comfort zone sexually. In her fictional universe, her protagonist Waldo is sexually experienced but lonely and isolated. She has fantasies but in fact she’s “the girl who shops at Shein and eats frozen dinners six nights a week.”
McCurdy made a splash as an author when she published her memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died back in 2022; it sold more than four million copies globally. In it, she revealed the bleak realities of her childhood as a child actor forced into the spotlight by a manipulative and volatile stage mother. Her first published fiction also deals with dysfunction, as Waldo sputters aimlessly and embarks on an affair with her married much-older English teacher (who creepily remains called “Mr Korgy”, even during sex). McCurdy is currently finishing scripts for the TV series based on her memoir, and also working on a screen adaptation of Half His Age, which she will direct.
We spoke with McCurdy on a Zoom call from LA and discussed what she reads, how she shaped her young protagonist, and resisting the urge to be moralistic.
What itch does fiction scratch relative to memoir? Did it give you a different kind of permissiveness?
Jennette McCurdy: I’ve written fiction for so long — I’ve written fiction most, I would say, growing up. Like a fantasy novel where there was literally a triple decker bus that was just a complete rip off of the night bus from Harry Potter. But I called it ‘the sherbet bus’ instead, and said it was multicolored, as if that made it okay. Throughout my 20s, I wrote screenplays and short stories and plays.
The novel wound up coming out because I was writing a different one. I had a draft and I was in the revision process, and then Half His Age just would not stop pushing itself up on me. Finally I got to the point where I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to put that other thing away for a week.’ I expected that what would happen is that I would just end the week recommitted to the other one — I had so much work on it done — and that did not happen. Instead, I had a first draft of ‘Half His Age’ in about a month. Over the following two years, and almost 20 drafts, this is what came out.
When you were on the Call Her Daddy podcast, you spoke about how anger is a motivating factor in your writing. Could you expand on that, how channeling that is productive?
Jennette McCurdy: Anger, I think is so, so, so useful. I think, as women, we’re so often told to be polite and to say the right thing, do the right thing, not offend anybody, not ruffle feathers, don’t be difficult, don’t be angry. And I think anger is actually incredibly mobilising. It’s where I feel like I write most effectively from. For me, with writing, my anger suggests that there is unexplored territory here. There’s a conversation worth having here.
What are you like as a reader?
Jennette McCurdy: When I’m in the writing process myself, I try to stay away from anything that’s too similar in its subject matter. I just want to really stay with the voice at hand. So in this case, I really wanted to be in Waldo’s head and not absorb anybody else’s ticks or habits or quirks. And then afterward, I’m like, I need to read. I need other people’s voices. Some things that I’ve read recently that I really loved: Flesh by David Szalay, Oh, my God. I love those blunt, crisp, clean sentences. I read Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey — funny and sad, my favorite combo. I read Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski, which… So much of his writing I bump up against. But I think it is so good and so funny, and I do appreciate his writing style.
Anger is actually incredibly mobilising. It’s where I feel like I write most effectively from
In terms of shaping Waldo, there are two things that really stood out about her. One was that she seems so isolated — she doesn’t have real connections. The other was her compulsive shopping aspect, this sense of trying to regenerate who she can be if she buys the right thing. How did you pull those threads: the loneliness and the consumption?
Jennette McCurdy: For the isolated part — that’s why I set the book in Alaska. I’ve spent so much time in Alaska, and certain aspects of it are absolutely beautiful and stunning. But in the heart of Anchorage, there are aspects of it that are very lonely, that are very desolate, that are very isolated. The Fifth Avenue Mall is completely abandoned. The clearance signs are hanging in the storefronts. I thought that that really underlined Waldo’s isolation. Her mom doesn’t see her, her best friend doesn’t see her, the town she lives in feels like she does — and I think that’s what it is to be a teenager. It feels like everything’s just compounded. I wanted to just underline her loneliness really wherever I could, to also show why someone could fall for somebody like a Mr Korgy in the first place.
The shopping didn’t come until midway through the drafting process. Somewhere around draft ten was when the shopping piece of her personality came into play. Now I cannot see her without that. It feels so pivotal to who she is, and it really showcases how much she’s clawing for an identity. I also think it’s interesting how her purchases really have no specific aim or direction. She’s going for this identity this day, another identity the next day. She’s going on these rabid online shopping sprees without any intent. That really communicates how much she craves to be somebody who feels better than she feels.
Waldo doesn’t see her single mum because of conflicting schedules, but also because her mum always prioritizes her dating life. Could you talk about shaping a family from scratch after you had just really explored your own?
Jennette McCurdy: A theme that will always be part of anything that I write is family dysfunction. I don’t know how to write without it. A there-for-you, supportive mother or father figure… I wouldn’t know where to begin. This is a piece of the book that has stayed from a very, very early stage. I knew that while this mum was very neglectful, she was a teen mum. This element was key to me in exploring Waldo, because I wanted to show how generational trauma can impact the choices we make and can be a contributing factor to Waldo falling for somebody like Mr Korgy.
Did you always know how the central relationship was going to play out? What you do hope that readers will feel about where things land?
Jennette McCurdy: I think the vast majority of the readers are going to be significantly older than Waldo — probably at least a decade older. And yet we’ve all, I think, been Waldo in some way, shape or form. We’ve been that girl. We’ve made choices that have humiliated us in retrospect. We’ve looked back on our past and cringed. We’ve clawed for love from someone who is incapable of loving us the way that we need. We’ve been pathetic, we’ve been desperate, and now we’re on the other side of it, hopefully. Of course, we can still experience all these things, but we’re in a different position than we were in then.
And yet, I think a lot of that can go unprocessed. We’re so ready for the next thing and moving forward and onward that sometimes we don’t take that moment to look back and — instead of cringing at our past self — sitting with her and finding the value in her, appreciating her, and processing experiences that might be overdue for processing. That’s what I hope Waldo presents for women.
On the one hand, the social conversation around gender dynamics and consent is evolving. And on the other hand there’s a sense that things remain exactly the same. I mean, you have Leonardo DiCaprio as a public punchline with his always-younger girlfriends. Power dynamics underpin relationships. Do you feel hopeful that things will evolve? Or is that just the reality of being a young woman, that there are predators and that there are pitfalls?
Jennette McCurdy: You know, I think about this a lot. I really hope that now people in their teens, people in their early 20s, are making better decisions — they do seem a lot smarter than I was at that age. There’s so much more access to information. But, inevitably, there are going to be mistakes. There are going to be regrets. I didn’t want to be finger-waggy, I didn’t want to be moralistic, I didn’t want to be preachy. I don’t think that’s helpful. That gets an eye roll and nobody’s attention. But I do hope that there are conversations started that can lead to takeaways that will be helpful, whether it’s making different choices, if there is somebody who’s maybe a younger reader, or for people my age and older — I hope that just leads to seeing our past selves with more compassion, as hard as it can be.
At several points, Waldo feels, or feels she’s perceived, like trailer trash. Mr Korgy is middle class, and so is her best friend, as is a guy she briefly dates. Why was that an important thing to establish for her?
Jennette McCurdy: She’s not holding herself with the respect that she deserves, with the value that she deserves, because of where she came from — because of judgments that she has about herself. That was an important thing to find growth in for her arc. Because I think those narratives can be a contributing factor to really detrimental decisions. It can be really sad how the things that we believe about ourselves can really lead us down paths that we never would have been on had we just held ourselves with a bit more esteem.
Though this is fiction, you have talked about the fact that this is based loosely on a relationship that you had. Was there also a sense that, in writing about it, it reframed your experience to you? Did it help you get rid of some demons?
Jennette McCurdy: I was in a significant age gap relationship. That was my first relationship. It wasn’t so much based on that as much as the unprocessed anger from that experience, which led to the initial writing process. Emotionally, a lot was coming up for me, and that was the cue to move forward.
I definitely found some closure. I think that’s a big part of writing for me, is finding closure in places where maybe there wasn’t any processing, situations that maybe I didn’t have the ability to process, finding new perspective, and hopefully doing the same for the for the people who read it.
Half His Age is available now.
