One Nightstand With Jennette McCurdy

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at the blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

Jennette McCurdy has an apology to make. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry Garden Grove Public Library,” she says. The apology concerns one of the favorite books of her youth, which spent a little more time at her house than it should have. “I loved Roald Dahl,” she says. “There was this one called The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, which is just a collection of short stories. But I got that from the library and I never returned it.” The appeal was physical as well as mental. “I would just stroke the cover,” she recalls. “It was just beautiful. It sort of had this grainy texture and the pages were yellow. Literally touching the book was as much of an experience as reading it.”

Alas, McCurdy spent far more of her childhood in a Nickelodeon TV studio than in a local library. She documented much of that experience in her 2022 memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, which has sold more than 4 million copies. The book devastated readers with a humorous and heartbreaking account of McCurdy’s relationship with her abusive mother and is being adapted for Apple TV. McCurdy will co-write and show run, with Jennifer Aniston starring as her mother. “I can’t say too much,” she says of the upcoming project. “But I can say I have a really clear vision for it. I know exactly what it is, and it’s really just a matter, I think, of making sure everybody on the team really understands that vision because it’s very specific.”

Instead, we’re here today to discuss another of her creative projects: a debut novel, Half His Age, which tells the story of Waldo, a 17-year-old Alaskan school girl who embarks on a relationship with her high-school teacher. The book is tender, funny, and surprisingly intimate, with McCurdy showcasing a deft ability to write about sex in a way that doesn’t make the reader cringe. “I think sex can look a lot of different ways,” she says. “It can be really disgusting, it can be really sexy, it can be really depressing, and I wanted to show all the shades throughout the course of the book. What I didn’t want to do are the two ways that I feel like I see it done a lot, which are that it’s very romanticized and completely unrealistic, or that it’s performatively clumsy where people are knocking into lampshades. Nobody’s actually knocking into a lampshade in real life.”

McCurdy’s willingness to wrestle with discomfort in all its forms — physical, sexual, social, moral — is part of what makes her so compelling to read. “I’m much braver as a writer than I am as a person,” she says. “So many of the things that I’m thinking, I can’t say. Do you know the amount of times that I’ve been on a Zoom, and I just want to be like, This should have been a f*cking email. Why are we all sitting here? This is a waste of everybody’s time. I don’t like half of you. The things that I want to say I can’t say. It’s just not socially acceptable to say 95% of my thoughts. But in writing, somehow it’s like, ‘Oh my God! The bravery! The honesty!’ Yet if I literally said the same exact thing in a Zoom, they’d be like, ‘Unprofessional.’”

This ability is particularly present when it comes to the book’s central romantic relationship. There is a flagrant abuse of power — Mr. Korgy is, after all, Waldo’s English teacher — but McCurdy resists the bright strokes of a rigid villainization. “I don’t think this is going to be a tragedy that defines her,” she says of Waldo’s affair with her teacher. “I think this is something that she will be able to look back on and laugh about, which is not making it more flippant or undermining it in any way, but it really, to me, reflects triumph on her part — and that feels important.”

McCurdy’s own triumph is that has already finished the screenplay for her adaptation of Half His Age, which she is attached to direct. “When you’re the person who birthed the thing, it only makes sense that you're the person who carries it to its next phase,” she says. “I’ve actually already met with a few actresses who are incredible and I’d be so lucky to work with any of them.”

Keep reading to discover five of McCurdy’s favorite books.

McCurdy’s first selection is Everything/Nothing/Someone by Alice Carrière. “She really unpacks trauma in a way that is beautiful and visceral and uncomfortable,” McCurdy says of the memoir, which tells Carrière’s story of growing up in New York as the daughter of artist Jennifer Bartlett and actor Mathieu Carrière, and her subsequent mental breakdown.

“She grew up extremely privileged, and I typically struggle to get on board with that kind of a point of view,” she says. “But she writes about privilege on the surface when really the underbelly of what’s happening underneath is so dark and so twisted and so messed up. It really is such a nice reminder that privilege can look a lot of different ways, and just because you’re financially privileged doesn’t mean you have privilege in literally any other area of life.”

Carrière’s memoir concludes with her confronting her estranged father and eventually forgiving him for the harm he caused her as a child, though this is where she loses McCurdy. “I don’t understand it,” she says. “Don’t get it. Never will.”

Her second pick, Fireworks Every Night by Beth Raymer, is a novel about a young girl reckoning with a dysfunctional family dynamic in 1990s Florida. “There’s a theme between both Everything/Nothing/Someone and Fireworks Every Night, which is that there are these inherently really intense, heavy subject matters, but there’s a note of humor to both of them that I think is so crucial,” she says. “I can’t do heavy on heavy. If we’re doing heavy subject matter and the tone is heavy, it’s just melodramatic and gets bogged down.”

She continues: “I resonate with female characters who are dealt a sh*tty hand. This is something that I think I’ll probably always try to write — a character who really deserves better than her circumstances and was just kind of born into the wrong place, wrong time, and fights against the odds to overcome those circumstances and does whatever she can to claw her way out in ways that are oftentimes, if not always, messy and not linear and challenging.”

Her third selection is by an author with whom McCurdy, by coincidence, shares an agent: Flesh by David Szalay. “Flesh is kind of the best of both worlds where it’s clearly so literary and just won the Booker Prize and is so hailed, understandably so, but also it’s so accessible and anyone can pick up that book and appreciate it,” she says.

“My favorite type of writing is when there are clean, simple sentences,” she says of the book. “I’m not a huge fan of big-words writing. If I feel like I’m being written at or I have this thing when I feel like somebody is trying to really show off with how they write, my instinct is touch them on the shoulder and say, ‘You’re enough.’”

If Flesh is a modern classic, her fourth choice is an old-timer: The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. “It’s just a book that’s really entertaining,” she says. “I love getting in the mindset of somebody who’s so naive, but also so creepy and unsettling. Some people talk about it as really empathizing with him. I don’t necessarily feel that when I’m reading.”

McCurdy is also, like many of us, a fan of the Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow adaptation. “The character of Marge changed so much in the best way,” she says. “I think Gwyneth Paltrow nailed it.”

Her final choice is Little Children by Tom Perrotta. “He is a genius and somebody who’s inspired me so much over the years,” she says. “I’ve read, I think, his entire body of work, much of it multiple times. It is just so striking. His character work is, I think, pretty unprecedented. And I know there’s a lot of conversation around who should be allowed to write what kinds of characters, and all I know is that I have never felt more seen as a woman than I have reading something that Tom’s written.”

Watch the full video below.