Reading Time: 4 minutes
She’s done it again!
Jennette McCurdy shocked the world with her debut book, I’m Glad My Mom Died.
The former child actress is now tapping into a different vein of rage in a new novel.
In Half His Age, she’s clearly bringing her own anger at having once dated a “f–king loser” man in his mid-30s when she was in her teens.
This is not her first book, but it is her first novel
Half His Age is out!
Jennette was never comfortable as a child actress because it was never her choice. She is much happier as an author — a successful one, at that.
Half His Age, she told ABC News, is a novel about an 18-year-old girl who is “ravenous.”
Jennette explained that the story is a way for her to “channel my own anger.”
Writing, she said, is “a way of channeling that anger in a healthy way.” The rage is, simply put, part of the healing process.
If you’re wondering why this author had so much rage to fuel her writing, she explained that.
Earlier this month, Jennette sat down on the Call Her Daddy podcast where she very directly discussed being “17 or 18” when a man in his mid-30s befriended her and then initiated a relationship with her.
In her interview, she freely acknowledged how her childhood of emotional and sexual abuse set the stage for a man twice her age to become her boyfriend.
Jennette recalled being a teen and “thinking that I was mature, thinking that I was so smart that this could happen.”
She continued: “I remember thinking like, ‘Oh yeah, there’s just something about me that’s a little different. Like, I’m special.’”
Red flags, red flags
“That’s what it felt like for me,” Jennette continued. “‘I’m special, I can connect with older people, younger people aren’t on my wavelength.’”
This wasn’t just in her own head. She said that the older man reinforced these messages.
“It was, you know, ‘You’re so mature. I can’t talk to anyone this way. I can’t believe how smart you are,’” Jennette described.
“Like, are you kidding me? I was such an idiot. I’m so embarrassed,” she expressed. She is, of course, not to blame.
In contrast, Jennette recalled the man’s male friends being friendly and cordial but feeling a distance from the women in those men’s lives. As an adult, she now sees that those women didn’t hate her — but were judging the man for dating a girl, well, half of his age.
As the interview emphasized, the power imbalance is inherent to age gap relationships to this degree. Even if they had not worked together, having twice someone’s life experience (the younger party being a teenager) is just going to put them on uneven footing.
“That it was ultimately my choice. That it was ultimately up to me. That ultimately, I was the one in charge,” she recalled believing.
“And I think if you feel really powerless, you’ll take that bait,” she explained.
Jennette described: “You know, you’ll take that, and you’ll go, ‘Okay, I really want that feeling of power even though my gut kind of knows this isn’t that, I’ll take what you’re saying, and I’ll try to run with it, and I’ll try to make it into some semblance of power.’”
She reasoned: “If you’re that desperate for it, you will take the bait. And I think I did.”
Certain types of older men tend to zero in on teens who are least prepared to see them coming
It is important to emphasize two things.
The first is that Jennette is not accusing this man of anything illegal. He only joined the show when she was about 18, and had been living in an apartment for 2 months before he (drunkenly) showed up to express his feelings and then cheat on his girlfriend with her. (She did not know this)
Being a “loser,” as she now accurately calls him, is not a crime.
The second is that the years of emotional and sexual abuse from her mother that she described in I’m Glad My Mom Died absolutely set the stage for this.
Jennette spent her childhood feeling powerless, being powerless. Convincing herself that she was choosing this for herself — not to mention that she likely felt that he created a buffer of safety against her mother — made her feel in control.
Combined with her Mormon upbringing, her homeschooling, and more, she had even less preparation than an average 18-year-old might have had within that dynamic.
