Jennette McCurdy follows her searingly honest memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died with a debut novel that refuses to look away from uncomfortable truths. Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy plunges readers into the interior world of Waldo, a seventeen-year-old navigating the treacherous waters of desire, class consciousness, and the desperate need to be seen. While McCurdy’s unflinching approach to difficult subject matter remains her signature strength, this transition from memoir to fiction reveals both the author’s narrative gifts and the inherent challenges of translating raw personal experience into constructed story.
The Architecture of Wanting
McCurdy constructs her protagonist with the same unvarnished honesty that characterized her memoir. Waldo exists in that liminal space between adolescence and adulthood, working minimum wage at Victoria’s Secret, living in a cramped apartment with her emotionally unavailable mother, and filling the void with online shopping binges and frozen dinners. When she fixates on Mr. Korgy, her middle-aged creative writing teacher, the novel becomes a study in how loneliness and desire can warp judgment and blur boundaries.
The author’s prose captures Waldo’s world through accumulation of detail—the specific brands of drugstore makeup, the fast-fashion websites, the microwaveable meals. These aren’t mere set dressing but evidence of how consumer culture shapes identity when authentic connection feels unreachable. Waldo shops compulsively, each purchase representing a promise that this lip stain or that cardigan might transform her into someone worthy of love. McCurdy understands that for women without resources, beauty products and cheap clothes become both armor and false hope.
Where Honesty Meets Discomfort
Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy doesn’t flinch from depicting its central inappropriate relationship. Readers expecting the novel to condemn or moralize will find instead a more complex portrait of how power imbalances, emotional need, and genuine attraction create situations that resist simple judgment. McCurdy writes Waldo’s obsession with visceral specificity—the way she catalogs Korgy’s physical imperfections with tenderness, how she orchestrates her appearance around his preferences, the mental gymnastics she performs to justify his behavior and her own.
This commitment to psychological realism is both the novel’s greatest strength and potential liability. Some readers may struggle with how fully McCurdy inhabits Waldo’s perspective, rendering Korgy as genuinely appealing through her protagonist’s eyes rather than maintaining authorial distance. The writing doesn’t externally judge these characters, trusting readers to recognize the dysfunction even as Waldo cannot. This approach feels brave but occasionally uncomfortable, walking a tightrope between portraying a teenager’s limited perspective and inadvertently romanticizing what is clearly an exploitative dynamic.
The Prose: Blunt Force and Dark Humor
McCurdy’s transition from memoir to fiction preserves her distinctive voice—direct, physical, darkly funny, and unafraid of ugliness. She writes about bodies with the same unflinching attention she brought to her own story, whether describing Waldo’s meticulous beauty routines, the mechanics of ill-suited sexual encounters, or the way grief and desire manifest physically. The prose occasionally veers into repetition, particularly around Waldo’s shopping compulsions and the circular nature of her obsession, but this mirrors the character’s mental state rather than representing careless writing.
The humor arrives in unexpected moments—Waldo’s observations about Mormon culture through her friendship with Frannie, her sardonic internal monologue while fitting women for bras, the absurdity of hiding in a closet while bleeding through her period. These moments of levity prevent the novel from becoming oppressively dark while highlighting Waldo’s sharp intelligence and self-awareness, even when she makes destructive choices.
Character Studies in Limitation
Beyond Waldo and Korgy, Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy populates its world with precisely drawn secondary characters. Waldo’s mother exists in her own cycle of dysfunction, perpetually chasing emotionally unavailable men while neglecting her daughter. Frannie, the wealthy Mormon friend, represents both genuine connection and the awkwardness of cross-class friendship. These relationships feel authentic in their limitations—people care about each other but remain trapped in their own patterns, unable to provide what the other needs.
Korgy himself emerges as neither monster nor misunderstood soul but as a deeply mediocre man whose midlife crisis finds an outlet in a student’s adoration. McCurdy’s characterization here proves most interesting; she grants him genuine feelings while never letting readers forget the fundamental selfishness of his actions. He wants to be seen as passionate, artistic, alive—and Waldo provides that reflection until the mundane reality of their relationship strips away the fantasy for both of them.
Thematic Ambitions and Structural Challenges
The novel explores consumer culture, class inequality, and how capitalism shapes female identity with notable insight. Waldo’s endless shopping represents more than personal weakness; it reflects how consumer goods promise transformation in a society offering few other paths to women without resources or education. Her job selling lingerie becomes a lens through which to examine how women are taught to perform desirability while their actual desires remain illegible or dangerous.
However, Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy occasionally struggles with pacing. The middle section, where the forbidden relationship becomes an established fact, loses narrative momentum. The repetition that works thematically—showing how obsession circles the same thoughts, how relationships decay through accumulated small disappointments—can feel tedious on the page. Some chapters read more as character sketches than forward momentum, though McCurdy’s prose remains engaging enough to carry readers through these slower passages.
The ending arrives with appropriate ambiguity, suggesting growth without offering false redemption. Waldo gains perspective but doesn’t transform into an entirely different person. She drives away from multiple disappointing relationships with a tentative sense of possibility—not healed but perhaps ready to begin the work of understanding herself outside others’ desires. It’s an honest conclusion that resists both punishment and reward, trusting that independence itself represents progress.
Literary Context and Craft
McCurdy joins a tradition of writers examining inappropriate teacher-student relationships with clear-eyed honesty rather than titillation. Her approach recalls Tampa by Alissa Nutting in its refusal to moralize from outside the protagonist’s perspective, though Waldo’s youth and vulnerability create different dynamics than Nutting’s predatory teacher protagonist. The novel’s attention to class and consumption connects it to contemporary working-class narratives, while its unflinching sexuality and dark humor align with writers like Ottessa Moshfegh.
Readers of McCurdy’s memoir will recognize familiar themes—dysfunctional maternal relationships, the performance of femininity, using self-destructive behaviors to manage emotional pain. The fictional format allows her to explore these themes with more distance and craft, creating patterns and symbols that feel deliberate rather than simply remembered. The repeated imagery of shopping carts, empty refrigerators, and transformative products builds a coherent aesthetic vision.
Final Assessment
Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy succeeds as a character study and psychological portrait while occasionally stumbling in its broader narrative construction. McCurdy writes with authority about class, desire, and the ways women are taught to shrink or perform to earn love. Her prose remains distinctive and engaging, her insights sharp, her willingness to portray uncomfortable truths without flinching admirable.
The novel’s greatest limitation lies in its middle section’s repetitive quality and the challenge of maintaining reader engagement with a relationship whose dysfunction becomes apparent long before the protagonist recognizes it. Some readers may also find the lack of explicit moral framing troubling, though others will appreciate McCurdy’s trust in her audience to draw appropriate conclusions.
For readers drawn to psychologically complex, unflinching examinations of female desire and the ways power and need intersect, this debut novel delivers. It doesn’t offer easy answers or comfortable resolutions, but it renders its protagonist’s inner life with startling specificity and genuine empathy. McCurdy has crafted a novel that understands how people—especially young women navigating limited options—make terrible choices while believing themselves to be choosing freely.
Recommended Reading
Readers who appreciate Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy might explore:
- My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh—for darkly funny examinations of female self-destruction
- Tampa by Alissa Nutting—for unflinching portrayals of inappropriate relationships
- The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis—for class-conscious coming-of-age narratives
- Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata—for outsider perspectives on conventional life paths
- Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill—for sharp, fragmented prose examining relationships and desire