Jennette McCurdy is often driven by rage.
Rage led her to quit acting and pursue writing. It spurred her to leave unhealthy relationships and overcome a severe eating disorder. And it fueled her blockbuster memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” a painful chronicle of her traumatic years as a young actor who was forced into the spotlight by a controlling, emotionally abusive mother.
“Rage has been one of the most, if not the most, useful emotions,” McCurdy said over pasta at an Italian restaurant in Pasadena earlier this month. “Any time I’ve felt genuine rage about something, it’s put my life on a corrective path that I have never looked back from.”
Anger also seeped into her first novel, “Half His Age,” a twisted story about a lonely teenage girl named Waldo who instigates a sexual relationship with her married, 40-year-old creative writing teacher.
The fury she felt as she was writing “Half His Age” came from a deeply personal place, McCurdy said. Like the novel’s narrator, McCurdy had a romantic relationship with a much older man as a teenager, at a time when she was vulnerable and deeply insecure about her body.
When McCurdy was 18 and co-starring on the Nickelodeon show “iCarly,” a man in his 30s who worked on the production began pursuing her — touching her in ways that felt charged, telling her how mature she seemed for her age. His attention made her feel special and grown-up, even as she felt coerced into sexual experiences she wasn’t emotionally prepared for.
She wrote about her relationship with the older man, whose identity she doesn’t reveal, in, “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” so she didn’t set out to revisit the experience in fiction. But the lingering discomfort shaped the novel in unexpected ways.
“I had a lot of unprocessed anger from that experience that I wanted to explore, and anger’s a really useful place to write from,” McCurdy said.
“Half His Age,” which Ballantine will release on Tuesday, marks a bold new chapter in McCurdy’s evolution as a writer, and an even more dramatic break from her past public persona as a Nickelodeon star.
The novel has already caused a stir ahead of its release, landing on most anticipated lists and drawing support from writers like Tom Perrotta, Lena Dunham and Gillian Flynn, who praised it in an interview as “eerie and unsettling and believable.”
On the day we met, McCurdy, 33, was fighting jet lag, having recently returned to California from a much needed vacation in Vietnam with her partner, whom she’s been with for nine years.
In the months leading up to the trip, she had been putting in long days, often working until 2 in the morning as she frantically juggled writing projects — finishing scripts for the Apple TV series based on her memoir, doing final revisions on “Half His Age” and then writing its screen adaptation, which she is attached to direct.
McCurdy speaks the way she writes, and vice versa — she’s funny and blunt, often surprisingly and winningly open. A few times during our conversation, she seemed to catch herself before reverting to old people-pleasing, self-deprecating tendencies.
She was hesitant at first when I asked about who she sees as her literary predecessors.
“There’s no way of answering this that doesn’t sound awful,” she said, weighing her response.
After an uncomfortable pause, I asked if she felt like her novel was filling a void. She conceded that she hasn’t come across many novels like “Half His Age,” with a complicated young female protagonist who is sexually aggressive, impulsive, voracious and vulnerable all at once.
“I don’t see it out there,” she said. “I feel I ought to stand by it and not shy away from it.”
The novel — which is laced with explicit and disturbing sex scenes between Waldo and her teacher — is likely to be polarizing, even among McCurdy’s fans. On Goodreads, some readers lauded her for taking on a thorny subject (“Gross, vulgar and uncomfortable but compulsive reading,” one five-star review said), while a smaller contingent panned it as “icky” and “explicit smut involving a minor.”
McCurdy knew she was venturing into risky territory by portraying the relationship as largely consensual. But she was careful not to sanitize the age gap. (The fact that Waldo, who is 17 when the relationship starts, often thinks of him as “Mr. Korgy” during sex is one of many red flags McCurdy plants.)Waldo notices Mr. Korgy’s sour breath, flabby body and broken blood vessels.
Yet she imagines that he will love her “if I wedge myself into a doll, a dream, a marionette with lifeless eyes, porcelain skin, and no needs of my own.”
Even the book’s cover, a lurid close up image of a girl’s mouth as she seductively sucks on one of her manicured fingers, is both hard to look at and hard to look away from.
“I wanted it to be really provocative and visceral,” McCurdy said of the cover. “I didn’t want anything abstract. I didn’t want a fruit. I feel like we’ve all seen that. Please stop with the fruits. I’m so exhausted by the fruits.”
McCurdy is not afraid of alienating readers; in fact, she hopes readers feel unsettled and queasy at times, she said. When I told her that I often felt simultaneously disturbed and engrossed by the novel, she was thrilled. “My dream,” she said, beaming.
“To me, if something makes you uncomfortable, it’s probably truthful,” she said. “If it doesn’t make you uncomfortable, it’s probably dishonest in some way.”
Growing up in Southern California in a volatile household, McCurdy was steered into acting from a young age by her mother, who started taking McCurdy to auditions when she was 6. She appeared in commercials and one-off TV roles before landing a recurring part on “iCarly” as Carly’s brash sidekick Sam Puckett — a character that came to define her publicly, which she was mortified by.
After her mother died from cancer in 2013, McCurdy, then 21, had an identity crisis. She’d never attended college. She’d spent her youth and young adulthood pretending to be other people onscreen. She’d been in troubling relationships with older men and was at war with her own body, becoming dangerously thin from anorexia and bulimia.
At 24, she quit acting and started writing, a decision she looks back on with satisfaction as “ballsy.” She wrote screenplays and spec scripts that went nowhere. She journaled and wrote a series of autobiographical essays about finding herself in her 20s.
“I had so much in me that I’d been wanting to say for so long,” McCurdy said.
Much of her early writing was raw, almost like an exorcism. “None of those things will ever see the light of day,” she said.
Then came her memoir, which went on to sell more than four million copies globally and drew rapturous reviews. Its success transformed McCurdy from a former child star into a literary heavyweight.
Maria Semple, the author of the best-selling novel “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” said that McCurdy’s ability to spin a complex, nuanced tale about her lost childhood and self-discovery made it clear from the start that she was a serious writer, not just a celebrity peddling scandalous stories about the entertainment business.
“She seems incapable of sentimentality,” said Semple, who’s become a friend. “She has this instinct for the mordant detail that would be the envy of any writer.”
McCurdy first had the idea for the story that would become “Half His Age” at 24, traveling on a bullet train through Japan. It wasn’t until about seven years later that she finally felt ready to pursue it. In the fall of 2022, she sold the novel to Ballantine in a reported two-book, seven-figure deal.
“If you loved her memoir, there were aspects of her voice that you would still recognize and appreciate and respond to, and other ways in which she grew even further as a writer,” said Jennifer Hershey, the publisher of Ballantine Bantam Dell. “She’s constantly examining herself and forcing herself to write about things that are uncomfortable but true.”
From the start, McCurdy knew that she didn’t want to write a conventional story about a victim and her abuser.
“That’s frankly boring to me, and I think we’re past that culturally, I think we can afford more nuance and gray area,” she said. “I see this as a story less focused on the taboo itself and more on the psychological examination of the young woman who’s experiencing it, and all the contributing factors that allowed her to fall into this relationship in the first place.”
At one point, McCurdy’s editor suggested that she tone down some of the explicit sex, but McCurdy didn’t want to use flowery language or euphemisms to describe their encounters, which could have romanticized their relationship, she said.
“I tried to go back and do the flowery thing. I couldn’t write it,” she said. “I feel sex is often explored in a romanticized, glorified way or it’s kind of cute and clumsy and quirky, and I think it’s rarely those things.”
McCurdy, who is writing another book, also a work of fiction, hopes women will relate to the story. She’s already gotten a barrage of messages on social media from women who have struggled with skewed power dynamics in relationships and are eager to read the novel, she said.
“Everybody has some relationship where they look back and go, I’ve got some questions about that now,” she said. “I’m glad female rage is resonating, because that’s something that I haven’t seen explored in the way I wish I’d seen it explored.”
She also hopes some men might read “Half His Age.”
“I think good men will take away the right things,” she said, adding that jerks — she used a stronger word — “aren’t going to read it.”
“They’re not in the bookstore,” she said. “I don’t know where they are. On Pornhub. Hours a day.”
Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times.
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