Review: "I'm Glad My Mom Died" by Jennette McCurdy

 

I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
Published August 2022 via Simon & Schuster
★★★★

Sometimes all you can say is oof. McCurdy had a childhood that looked shiny on the outside—child actress, successful, a mother who devoted her time and energy to her kids, and in particular to her daughter, to encourage success. Her mother was her best friend, her raison d'être.

But just behind the veneer was something else: her mother's hoarding problem, which meant that the family could no longer sleep in their beds, but rather on folding mats in the living room. Her mother's insistence on dressing her kids, showering her kids, and performing some form of pelvic/chest exams on her kids well into their teens. The phrase if Momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy comes to mind—but in this case, that meant if Momma ain't happy, there will be hysterics and threats of violence until everyone gives in. McCurdy knew she couldn't so much as try a new ice cream flavour without her mother getting upset, because trying something new was a sign that she was growing up, and her mother wasn't ready for that. Now now, not ever.

Consequently, McCurdy describes a childhood in which she was never really allowed to be a child. Introduced to calorie restriction as a young child—a way to stay small, to be more desirable for roles on children's television—she struggled with eating disorders for years, with her mother's approval. (Better to stay sick if that means staying skinny, after all.) A father who was physically present but checked out enough to misspell McCurdy's name on her eighth birthday card. A career in which she was valued for her ability to cry on cue—and in which the adults responsible for casting, once they'd seen that she could do so, might demand that she do it again just for their entertainment.

I cannot say that the book makes me think well of Hollywood.

All together, though, it's very well done—tightly edited, with scenes chosen to make their points. As often as not, McCurdy describes the leadup to an audition but not the audition itself, or rehearsing (under her mother's hyper-critical eye) for a scene but not the filming itself—because acting was a byproduct of the rest of her life, I guess. Never her own goal, and not where the real stories are. There's a lot still left unsaid: I imagine there's a lot more behind McCurdy's mother's story, for example, though McCurdy herself might not know what (or might for a variety of reasons have opted to leave that out). But jeepers creepers. I'm glad McCurdy has found a way to get herself on a healthier, and more fitting for who she is, track.

Review: "Shameless" by Nadia Bolz-Weber

 

Shameless by Nadia Bolz-Weber
Published January 2019 via Convergent Books
★★★★

So—I'm not the intended audience for this book. The intended audience grew up in a fairly conservative church, probably, and received sex ed along the lines of "if you have sex outside of marriage, you'll catch an STD and die, and then you'll go to hell for it." I grew up in an areligious family, and the sex ed I got was more along the lines of "if you have sex, use a condom because you don't want to be a teenage parent or have to deal with an STD." (Well. Mostly. I had a very strange amalgamation of sex ed classes, but that was the upshot.)

But...having read a fair amount, recently, about the ways in which so many churches teach people (but especially women) to distrust their own bodies and own experiences, it was something of a relief to read an antidote to that. This book does have a specific audience, I think: people who grew up with a specific type of church teaching around sex and "purity," yes, but also people who have stepped away from that sort of church/teaching enough to be able to say "hang it all, I'm keeping only the parts that work for me." It won't sit well with everyone, but it feels like a very necessary different—and far more compassionate—perspective.

Alas, though, I am now out of Nadia Bolz-Weber books to read, because I still don't have a copy of Salvation on the Small Screen. But it's been more than three years since her last book, so surely a new one is due soon...?

Review: "Three Ordinary Girls" by Tim Brady

Three Ordinary Girls by Tim Brady
Published February 2021 via Citadel Press
★★★

For all that I've heard about the strength of the Dutch resistance, it strikes me that I've read very few stories of that resistance: real people, who in peacetime would likely live ordinary lives with very little fanfare, doing whatever they could to slow the advance of the Nazis. It also feels very on point to read this sort of thing now, when my news sources are full of stories about Ukrainian teachers and students and farmers who have been catapulted into new roles they never wanted—ones in which they fashion molotov cocktails and teach field first aid and learn to fire weapons.

The writing is fairly flat, possibly in part because no matter how much research Brady did for this (and I have no idea what sorts of connections he might have, if any, to the Netherlands or the Dutch resistance), this was never going to be his story—it's all somebody else's story, somebody else's dialogue remembered years and years later. In some places the story must have been reconstructed third- or fourth-hand, because (not really a spoiler) not all first-hand sources were alive to tell the tale.

Much of this, though, is a reminder of how scrappy war can get: how plans fall apart, how a few people with more bravery than common sense can grow into a resistance cell with little direction or oversight, how sometimes a rescue mission can turn terribly deadly...and then be forgotten to time, because there is so much horror in war that the individual moments stop standing out. And then how murky ethics can get, and how quickly heroism can get muddied by politics.

All three women have Wikipedia profiles, though if you're going to read this book—or another longer-form work about them—I'd recommend holding off on the Wikipedia rabbit hole.

Review: "Spindled" by Shanna Swendson

 

Spindled by Shanna Swendson
Published April 2020
★★★★

Delightful, playful turn to YA here—some of it requires a bit of suspension of disbelief, but then...fairy tales. The one thing that disappointed was the romance: I know I'm an anomaly here in that I'm always whingeing about the amount of space taken up by it in YA fiction, but this could have been such a strong platonic-friendship story if it weren't for the emphasis on hearts and flowers. Two girls against the world! Still, there's room in the ending for a sequel, so I can hold out some hope of that friendship story.

Reread: "Thin Ice" by Marsha Qualey

Thin Ice by Marsha Qualey
Originally read sometime around 2000
★★★★

A childhood reread. Funny what things stick with you (Arden's pompadour, the origin of her name, the bowling shirts, the time Arden calls the cops) and what doesn't (Jean and Kady, Hannah, Arden's seventeenth-birthday kiss). I love so many things about this pre-cellphone, barely-into-the-Internet-age type of YA (though there are also some glaring gaps, such as the way the characters are all white and straight and able-bodied and basically financially sound), and rereading now makes me think that this, like Ellen Emerson White, has been inadvertently quite influential on my own writing. Makes me want to go through other old childhood favorites and see what does, and doesn't, stand the test of time.