A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Here is a letter Jennette McCurdy got from her mom.

Dear Net,

I am so disappointed in you. You used to be my perfect little angel, but now you are nothing more than a little SLUT, a FLOOZY, ALL USED UP. And to think—you wasted it on that hideous OGRE of a man. I saw the pictures on a website called TMZ—I saw you in Hawaii with him. I saw you rubbing his disgusting hairy stomach. I KNEW you were lying about Colton. Add that to the list of things you are—LIAR, CONNIVING, EVIL. You look pudgier, too. It’s clear you’re EATING YOUR GUILT.

Thinking of you with his ding dong inside of you makes me sick. SICK. I raised you better than this. What happened to my good little girl? Where did she go? And who is this MONSTER that has replaced her? You’re an UGLY MONSTER now. I told your brothers about you and they all said they disown you just like I do. We want nothing to do with you.

Love, Mom (or should I say DEB since I am no longer your mother)

P.S. Send money for a new fridge. Ours broke.

Relatable.

Jennette McCurdy's mother wanted to be an actress, so she made her daughter into one. It worked out about as well as you'd expect.

Jennette's mother was a cancer survivor up until the point that she failed to survive; she made a video of her cancer diagnosis and treatments and made the kids watch it every weekend to remember how amazing she is. She whips out her "stage four cancer survivor" status on every possible occasion, to agents, directors, waiters, and security guards. And that is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

She pushes Jennette into acting, which she hates and is temperamentally unsuited for, to the point where she gets the second lead on a Nickelodeon show, iCarly. (Reading this book, I learned that the show was not about an AI named Carly, but three teenagers who make a sort of early vlog.) Jennette makes friends on set, but the creator is a creepy emotional abuser and fame is both her worst nightmare and feeds her worst tendencies.

Based on the title, I expected this book to be about how much Jennette hated her mother. In fact, the problem--well, one of them--was that she loved her mother. They were extremely enmeshed and living each other's lives, and up until her mother died of cancer, Jennette was desperate to please her. The disillusionment came later, when she finally took a breath and looked out at the wreckage of her life.

There's awful stuff in this book but it's also very funny. Jennette has a distinctive, sharp, very modern narrative voice. The chapters are structured like little short stories or TV episodes, often with punchlines. She sees two therapists, and remarkably manages to capture the actual experience of therapy very well. I laughed a lot, but in solidarity. Though her terrible relationship with her mother is bad for pretty much the exact opposite reasons and in the opposite ways that my relationship with my parents was bad, I found it very relatable.

It also has some excellent surprises I don't want to spoil.

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I listened to this in audio read by the author, which I definitely recommend.

Thanks for the rec, mildred_of_midgard!

Content notes: Child abuse, bulimia, anorexia, alcoholism, cancer, mental illness, child labor, gross descriptions of vomit which I fast-forwarded.

Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales.

A fascinating analysis of how people survive accidents, disasters, or other extreme circumstances, complete with gripping accounts of people who survived shipwrecks, getting lost in the wilderness, or (in one case) falling out of an exploded plane and waking up still strapped into your seat, in the middle of a rainforest, with a broken collarbone and possessing nothing but the Communion dress you're wearing. The book has clear and logical explanations of the biological, biochemical, psychological, and sociological processes involved in getting lost, feeling fear, doing stupid things, getting into dangerous situations, and surviving them. Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys well-written and (I think) accurate popular science books or survival stories. I think yhlee, tweedkitten, and branna would particularly enjoy it.

Trauma Junkie: Memoirs of an Emergency Flight Nurse, by Janice Hudson.

The title pretty much says it all. If this sounds like something you'd enjoy, you will, and if it doesn't, you won't. I love true medical stories, so I liked this, but it's not well-written enough to lift it above that category and become recommendable to anyone, as James Herriott's books, say, are terrific whether you care about veterinary medicine or not.

The Hungry Ocean: A Swordboat Captain's Journey, by Linda Greenlaw.

Memoir of the world's only female swordboat captain, this has the exact same problem as the Hudson book: it's fascinating if you're already interested in the subject matter, but less so if you're not. I am not especially interested in boats, fishing, or the ocean, so although this was reasonably well-written I didn't find it gripping and ended up skimming much of it. In contrast, I was positively glued to Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm-- in which Greenlaw makes a cameo appearance.

Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood, by Jennifer Traig

A childhood memoir about the young Traig's experience with a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder which took the form of compulsive and excessive religiousity. Although Traig's family was not only not observant but loved bacon, poor Traig's OCD latched on to Judaic law as the central ordering principle of her life-- and the more obscure and weird the law, the better. Her family was extremely supportive and understanding despite her bizarre behavior, and had a good sense of humor about it, so this memoir is surprisingly positive in tone. In fact, it's one of the most family-friendly memoirs I can recall reading.

The trouble is that there isn't enough material to support an entire book. So while the first few chapters are lively, thought-provoking, and funny, by the halfway mark Traig is clearly padding with long accounts of her family background and peccadillos that have little or nothing to do with her OCD, and are only mildly amusing in and of themselves. This would have made a terrific long feature article, but ultimately there's not enough there there.