This book review was written by Grant Norman. If you would like to submit your own content to Amerikaner, please email AmerikanerContributions@proton.me
I bet you never expected to see this review on a Dissident Right website, but here we are. Before getting into this book, I have a confession: my dream as a kid was to be an actor, and not an actor in the grand style of the stage and screen. I wanted to be on a Nickelodeon or Disney Channel original series, not anything remotely close to high art or considered, well, good. I thought it looked like a lot of fun being on something like Drake and Josh, Lizzie McGuire, or The Suite Life of Zach and Cody.
That dream died when I realized that I wasn’t a cute kid, but a weird-looking teenager and that window had closed. Thankfully it did, and now I write reviews for this website as my main creative outlet. I knew that I was fortunate to avoid the siren song of Hollywood, but I’m not sure I realized just how lucky until I read “I’m Glad My Mom Died”, former child actress Jenette McCurdy’s memoir of growing up in the gilded world that is held up as the pinnacle of the American dream.
In our sphere, there are certainly a lot that has been said about how sick and twisted Hollywood is. Thanks to the furor over Harvey Weinstein’s abuses and other high-profile cases, even the general public has become more and more aware of how sick and deranged the little subculture in Southern California really is. Lurid tales of prostitution, drug use, and pedophilia have dogged the film industry since its founding, and even before, surrounding the whole acting profession since the days of Shakespeare. Instead of being lionized as morally superior beings and physical gods, actors and actresses used to be forbidden from being buried in graveyards with normal people and were instead buried in the cemeteries reserved for whores and lepers – something that deserves a comeback.
McCurdy doesn’t shy away from some of the more sinister parts of the entertainment industry, including veiled references from her time as a lead actress on Nickelodeon’s hit show iCarly to world-class creep Dan Schneider’s verbal abuse and strange come-ons to actors and actresses, but she reserves the most of her ink for the stories of the abuse that she suffered at the hands of her own mother. In her book, McCurdy does not shy away from horrifying tales of child abuse. I read with bated breath stories of McCurdy’s mother threatening her father with a kitchen knife on a semi-regular basis, and of being introduced to anorexia by the woman whose job should have been to nurture and support her daughter, not stunt and scar her. Worst of all, McCurdy seemed to have been wholly unaware of how unusual, how monstrous, this style of parenting was. It is only after reaching adulthood and adding bulimia and alcoholism to the existing cocktail of self-esteem and body image issues that McCurdy finally begins receiving therapy and the horrible truth about her mom, her “best friend”, becomes clear to her.
There is a line in author and expert on child abuse Stephen King’s novel The Shining which reads, “This inhuman place makes human monsters.” That came to mind as I read this story because, as much as we point to the horrors of Hollywood producers and other bigwigs, the truth is that there still seems to be a ready supply of families offering their children up to the sick savage gods of Carthage. Just like with the Christian families who volunteered their children to serve as converted and castrated janissaries in the Ottoman Empire, McCurdy’s mom is merely an enthusiastic supporter of a system which doesn’t merely not care about her, but actually hates her. What would drive a family to give their children over to the Turks centuries ago, and are these the same incentives that inspire the families of Hollywood starlets today? There is no one who forces McCurdy’s mother to abuse her psychologically and physically, and that is what is so terrible about the whole story. McCurdy’s own mother is responding desperately to the incentives that she is seeing, even if they are imaginary.
The stories of McCurdy having to shower with and have her hair shampooed by her insistent mother to get the right level of volume and sheen to successfully audition for roles, or getting hair dye in her eyes from the same woman trying to dye McCurdy’s eyelashes in imitation of Dakota Fanning are the stories of a woman receiving horrible signals sent out into the world.
The idle imaginings of the Q Anon believers of yesteryear look tame compared to the trauma that McCurdy is put through, including inducing anorexia to delay puberty. It is obvious that those responsible for the current network of interlocking evil systems which scar the American continent are at the top. I refuse to believe in blaming the victim wholesale for the crimes of her abuser, but there are certainly willing, even eager, collaborationists in this nightmarish country. It is a land where a woman will offer up her child, not for the sake of God, the revolution, or even art, but for a three-season Nickelodeon sitcom for nine- to twelve-year-olds.
This inhuman place makes human monsters.
For all this pain and this suffering that McCurdy has gone through, her book ends with the story of her recovery and her realization of just how awful her mother was to her. By its end, we find McCurdy no longer merely a victim but a survivor in the true sense of the word. McCurdy’s survival does not come in dwelling obsessively on the past (and, for some, legislating that others obsesses about their past as well), but in picking herself up off of the ground and working to become something greater. Ironically, the former child star of an embarrassing show which she’d very much like everyone to forget winds up looking more heroic at the end of her journey than the titans of the industry.
McCurdy has survived her ordeal and I sincerely wish her all the best, but her story still leaves me feeling unsettled. Her story holds up a mirror to the horrible state of our country and our people, and it will be a Herculean task to end the damage being done so that we may find our own path to national recovery.