After reading Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died, I am genuinely shocked that we didn’t get to see the reappearance of Sam Puckett whacking her toxic family across the head with a sock full of butter—or at least true iCarly fans would understand. What’s most interesting here is that Jennette McCurdy’s true character is quite the opposite of her blunt, aggressive, and carefree character on the hit live action comedy show and rather timid, shy, and generally more soft spoken—something that I, myself, even have a difficult time wrapping my head around.
And of course I’m not one of those fans who finds themselves struggling to distinguish the TV character from the real-life persona—but Jennette’s characters are on completely opposite ends of the personality spectrum, so you have to cut me a little slack here.
But there’s far more to Jennette’s story than we ever realized before. It seems her time starring on Nickelodeon was riddled with several instances of emotional, mental, and physical abuse—and her entire acting career was tainted from the very beginning. In McCurdy’s memoir titled I’m Glad My Mom Died, she details the full extent of the abuse she endured and discusses her estranged relationship with her mother who eventually passed away in 2013 after a lengthy battle with breast cancer that lasted for over a decade.
McCurdy confesses that her mother practically forced her into acting despite her fear and reluctance to perform. She also stated that her mother implemented a toxic lifestyle and strict diet in her early years, urging her to watch her calorie intake and overall body weight. As a result, McCurdy developed severe eating disorders and grew incredibly self-conscious of her appearance. Her mother embedded the insecurities even further through frequent weigh-ins, body checks, and physical measurements, and she even supplied McCurdy with dietary catalogs at the age of 11.
McCurdy also admitted that her mother used manipulative tactics in order to control her, citing frequent occurrences in which her mother used her cancer diagnosis to influence the way she acted, felt, and thought. She described the household as highly toxic and chaotic as a result of her mother’s controlling and possessive behavior.
McCurdy’s memoir details the abusive relationship that lasted up to her mother’s death in 2013 where she describes how the long-term abuse she endured affected her over the years. Jennette has made it quite clear that she did not have too many fond memories of her Nickelodeon days, a factor that makes her appearance on the network quite unsettling as her early acting days were plagued with nothing more than parental abuse and severe exploitation.
