When Janet McCurdy was 16, she was in her third year on “iCarly,” Nickelodeon’s hit teen series. Millions of young viewers admired her for her comic portrayal of Sam Puckett, the main character’s wise-cracking friend, and she was proud that her lucrative job helped support her family.
McCurdy also lived under the strict control of her mother, Debra, who guided her career, dictated her meals — her dinners consisted of sliced chunks of low-calorie bologna and lettuce drizzled with dressing — and even gave her showers.
Her mother performed what she believed to be cancer screenings on her breasts and vagina and shaved her daughter’s legs while McCurdy remained largely uninformed about the changes her body was undergoing.
She struggled with OCD, eating disorders and anxiety brought on by the constant attention she received as a celebrity, but felt trapped by her job. She also believed she owed her unwavering loyalty to her mother, who had been cured of breast cancer when Janet was very young, only for her cancer to return in 2010, at the height of her daughter’s fame.
Debra McCurdy died in 2013, and Janet, now 30, still reckons with the gravitational pull exerted by her mother, who steered her into the trade, which gave her visibility and financial stability while she controlled almost every aspect of existence to his daughter.
When Janet McCurdy wrote the memoir, which Simon and Schuster will publish on August 9, it was clear to her that her relationship with her mother would provide the power of the narrative. “It’s the rhythm of my life,” she said recently.
The book is titled I’m Glad My Mother Died, and the cover features an image of McCurdy, a narrow half-smile on her face, holding a pink funeral urn with strings of confetti peeking over the rim. The presentation may be off-putting to some readers; the author is aware. But she also thinks it accurately encapsulates a coming-of-age story that’s alternately harrowing and wickedly funny.
When you’ve grown up like her, feeling both tenderness and anger for a man you’ve seen possess immense power while fighting for his own life, she said, “You can’t believe how hard it is and how funny it is at the same time . That’s totally my sense of humor.
“I feel like I’ve done the processing and put in the work to earn a title or a thought that seems provocative,” she added.
While McCurdy may have the résumé of a seasoned Hollywood veteran, she acted like a wide-eyed tourist on a visit to New York in late June. Over afternoon tea at the BG restaurant in midtown Manhattan, she glared at fellow diners, asked for Broadway theater recommendations and chastised herself for a Transcendental Meditation class she took near her home in Los Angeles.
“I haven’t seen any results yet,” she said with a smile, “but we’ll see.”
As for new ventures, McCurdy said, “I think things should feel natural. So much of my life has been about forcing or pushing things. So when I feel something is working, I’ll leave it and everything else can fall away.”
As McCurdy recounts in her memoir, she was 6 years old when she began auditioning for acting roles after being introduced to the work by her mother, who herself had been discouraged from becoming an actress by her own parents.
Raised in Southern California, McCurdy starred in TV commercials and shows like “Mad TV,” “Malcolm in the Middle” and “CSI” before landing “iCarly,” which debuted in 2007. Yet she never she had no illusions about who really benefited from these achievements. As she writes about the moment she found out she booked ‘iCarly,’ ‘Everything is going to be better. Mom will finally be happy. Her dream came true.”
McCurdy suffered various embarrassments and humiliations at Nickelodeon, where she wrote that she was photographed in a bikini in a closet and was encouraged to drink alcohol by a frightening figure she simply referred to as the Creator. In situations where her mother was present, Debra did not intervene or speak up, instructing Janet that this was the price of success in show business: “Everybody wants what you have,” she would tell her daughter.
When McCurdy was promised an “iCarly” spinoff, she assumed she’d be given her own show — only to land a slot on “Sam and Cat,” which paired her with future pop sensation Ariana Grande.
There, she says her superiors on those shows prevented her from pursuing career opportunities outside of the show, while Grande thrived in her extracurriculars. As McCurdy writes, “What finally broke me was when Ariana came in whistling with excitement because she’d spent the night before playing charades at Tom Hanks’ house. That was the moment I broke.”
As McCurdy grew older and became more independent, her relationship with her mother became even more strained. The book reproduces an e-mail in which her mother calls her a “SPOT,” a “STUFF” and an “UGLY MONSTER,” before ending with a request for money for a refrigerator. When Debra’s cancer relapsed and died, Janet, then 21, was set free—and left to navigate a complicated world without her guidance, struggling with destructive romantic relationships, bulimia, anorexia, and alcohol abuse.
“iCarly” ended its original run in 2012, and “Sam & Cat” had just one season from 2013-14, after which, McCurdy wrote, she turned down a $300,000 offer from Nickelodeon if she agreed to never talk publicly about your experiences on the web. (A spokesperson for Nickelodeon declined to comment.)
She was free to reclaim her personal life and pursue other projects, such as the Netflix sci-fi series In Between. But it was hard for her to let go of the resentment of how she had been treated when she was younger. As she said in an interview, “It felt like all these decisions were being made on my behalf and I was the last one to know about them. This is really infuriating. This led to a lot of anger.
Even now, McCurdy has found revisiting her child-star era reigniting hard feelings toward a parent and an industry that failed to protect her.
“My whole childhood and adolescence was very exploited,” she said, her eyes filled with tears. “It still gives my nervous system a reaction to say it. There were times when people had the best of intentions and perhaps didn’t know what they were doing. And also cases where they did it – they knew exactly what they were doing.”
Marcus McCurdy, the eldest of Janet’s three brothers, said their mother was constantly erratic when they were growing up.
“You’ve always walked on eggshells — is she going to be a nice mom or a crazy mom?” he said. “One day he would be fine, the next day he would be yelling at everyone. Every holiday was super dramatic. She would lose her mind on Christmas if something wasn’t perfect.
Friends and colleagues from Janet McCurdy’s time as a child actor said they could sense the strain in her relationship with her mother, even if they don’t yet know the exact details.
“Janet can be outgoing, very forward, bright and electric,” said David Archuleta, the pop singer and “American Idol” finalist. “I can also tell that she was very guarded, very protective of her mother and they were very close.”
Archuleta, whose career was tightly controlled by his father when he was a minor, said such arrangements can be destructive to children.
“Because you’re always with that parent, they don’t really let you around anybody else,” Archuleta said. “You don’t look at it as a control thing — you look at it as, ‘Oh, they care about me.’ And they make you feel like everybody’s against you.
Over time, Archuleta added, the parent can become toxic. “It gets to the point where it’s like, ‘You can’t make any decisions on your own.’ You can’t do anything alone. You’re too dumb.”
Miranda Cosgrove, the “iCarly” star, said that while she and McCurdy quickly bonded on the show, she was initially unaware of many of the struggles her friend faced, which McCurdy didn’t reveal until they were older.
“When you’re young, you’re so much in your own head,” Cosgrove said. “You can’t imagine that the people around you have much harder struggles.”
In a softer voice, Cosgrove added, “You don’t expect that kind of thing from the guy in the room who makes everyone laugh.”
For McCurdy, opening himself up to the wider world is a long-term process. In her late teens and early 20s, she wrote essays for The Wall Street Journal sharing some of her insights about the child star. But today she feels that she has not been fully forthcoming.
“If I was honest at the time,” she explained, “I would have said, ‘Yeah, I wrote that and then I went and made myself throw up four minutes after that.’
A few years ago, McCurdy began writing a new series of personal essays, including several about his mother, and shared them with his manager at the time. “My manager sent me a nice email saying, ‘This is great—I really don’t know what to do with this.’ I’ll never forget the ‘xoxo’ at the end.” (McCurdy no longer works with that manager.)
Instead, she began performing a one-woman show also called “I’m Glad My Mother Died” in Los Angeles. Although the pandemic prevented plans to produce the show, McCurdy used some of his time to write the memoir. “I really wanted to build it up a lot more, get more into the children’s aspect of the story and work through the arc in a way that you can only with a book,” she explained.
Marcus McCurdy said he supported his sister’s decision to write her memoir, although her calling it ‘I’m glad my mother died’ caused some consternation in…
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