Jennette McCurdy’s 'Half his Age' is a disgrace to feminist art

The actress-turned-author’s second book released on January 20th, 2026.

Child star Jennette McCurdy who joined Nickelodeon’s iCarly when she was about 14 years old, released her first book in 2022, titled I’m Glad My Mom Died, which was immensely successful, selling over three million copies worldwide. In her memoir, her sharp witty observations about her mother’s abuse, about the alleged Dan Schneider’s abuse are all excellent writing. The book is now being turned into an Apple TV + series, with Jennifer Aniston playing McCurdy’s mother. It spent over 80 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. What McCurdy does well in her memoir is toe the line between wit and honesty, and speak well about the impact that having an abusive mother can have.

Half his Age comes nowhere close. It has all the right ingredients. A 17 year old girl who has been left untethered by her mother. An absent father. A world out to eat the weak alive. The visceral tale follows Waldo, a girl in Alaska who has a relationship with her middle aged Creative Writing teacher.

To McCurdy’s credit, Waldo is an admirable character. She is intelligent, capable, and unsentimental about her circumstances. Her flaws — internalised misogyny, compulsive shopping, emotional detachment, are rendered honestly.

Nevertheless, strong characterisation cannot rescue a fundamentally careless moral vision.

McCurdy imports the same wry, resentful voice that throttled through her memoir, but fiction demands a sharper understanding of relational dynamics — especially when those dynamics involve a minor and an authority figure. Here, the imbalance of power between Waldo and Mr. Korgy is neither adequately interrogated nor meaningfully critiqued. The book reads like an exercise in provocation for its own sake.

McCurdy’s attempt to write frankly about female sexual desire lands particularly poorly. The prose veers into crude explicitness, mistaking shock for insight. At its worst, is a love child of teenage Wattpad fiction and Charles Bukowski stripped of his metaphysical weight entirely transgressive without being remotely illuminating,

The novel’s aesthetics reinforce this discomfort. The cover, featuring a young woman (not McCurdy) sucking her middle finger, signals a posture of defiance that the text never justifies. The sex scenes are frequent, graphic, and emotionally hollow, generating unease without purpose.

Ironically, the most compelling thread in Half His Age is not its eroticism, but its depiction of obsession and projection. Neither Waldo nor Mr. Korgy appears genuinely in love. Instead, they cling to each other to fill absences elsewhere: his dissatisfaction with a wife who no longer mirrors his fantasies, her hunger as a creature who never received the love everyone deserves. Mr. Korgy emerges as an emasculated man, terrified of his own unrealised ambitions; Waldo, as a young woman starved of care and boundaries.

Half His Age wants to be brave, but bravery without responsibility (or good prose) is not feminist art — it is indulgence. Where I’m Glad My Mom Died confronted abuse with clarity and purpose, this novel aestheticises it, leaving the reader unaffected and unmoored.

Please note: This article reflects the personal views of the author