I'm Glad My Mom Died

Jennette McCurdy’s memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died is a difficult read, though not necessarily in a negative sense. Simply, the topics it explores are deeply personal yet widely applicable, making it a rare example of a memoir that zooms in on a particular season in one’s life yet repeatedly raises existential (and often hilarious) questions we can all wrestle with lifelong. You can be sure of one thing after finishing this book: the mechanics of childhood matter. In the moment, we can all normalize the contexts we find ourselves in early on, yet it often takes time and new experiences for introspection to take place to help us decide which life practices to carry forward and which to revise or leave behind.