“I love to make people uncomfortable. It’s a priority for me,” said Jennette McCurdy, her blond curls bouncing as she speaks animatedly via video call from L.A. She’s referring to her new novel, “Half His Age,” but also the kind of stories she wants to tell, the ones she refuses to soften.
“I don’t go into a project thinking ‘how can I make people the most uncomfortable?’ But if I’m writing truthfully, and truth is my North Star, I know that as a byproduct, it’s going to make people uncomfortable,” she said.
Once a child actress on Nickelodeon shows including “iCarly” and “Sam & Cat,” McCurdy has since stepped away from acting, re-establishing herself as a writer drawn to the messier aspects of the human experience. In her 2022 memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” she candidly recounted her childhood shaped by emotional abuse and the pressures of child stardom, including grappling with eating disorders and addiction. The book sold over 200,000 copies in its first week and became an instant New York Times bestseller. Now, with her fiction debut, McCurdy is doubling down on exposing hard truths.
“Half His Age” follows 17-year-old Waldo as she navigates a relationship with her 40-year-old English teacher, Mr. Korgy — a controversial premise. “While there is an age-gap relationship in the novel, it’s less focused on the taboo itself and more so on the contributing factors that lead a young person into this kind of relationship in the first place,” McCurdy said.
The idea surfaced years ago while McCurdy was on a bullet train in Japan. She began to feel an itch to write a novel, building on her skill for writing screenplays and short films. From the outset, she knew she wanted to explore an age-gap relationship, but just as importantly she wanted it to be entirely from the perspective of the 17-year-old, with no retrospective lens, to prevent this situation from defining the character’s entire life. “I believe in a world where Waldo is not thinking about this anymore; she’s so far past it. She would look back on it with a laugh.”
That decision to stay inside Waldo’s unprocessed experience shapes the novel’s texture. It ruminates in the foggy contradictions and confusion of adolescence, while interrogating her surroundings and the generational trauma that led to this moment.
Raised by a single mother who prioritizes romantic relationships over stability, Waldo salivates for male attention. “There are the narratives that guide you to make certain choices in your life,” McCurdy said. “If you speak with someone for 10-15 minutes, you start hearing their narratives, and you can see what they believe about who they are and how those beliefs lead them down certain paths.”
Waldo develops a shopping addiction and becomes hyperobsessed with her appearance — she works at Victoria’s Secret, surrounded by airbrushed images of scantily clad supermodels. Coupled with hot and cold attention from Mr. Korgy, she seems trapped in a Skinnerian reinforcement cycle of male validation.
At 18, McCurdy experienced an age-gap relationship herself, but says Waldo is entirely her own character. “There’s little to no overlap,” she said. Still, she felt enraged while writing, specifically the sex scenes. “I wanted to show how much can really underscore sex, and that it’s not just charged by lust, but is also charged with shame, disappointment or rage,” she said. “Waldo progresses from very lustful interactions with Korgy to being fuelled by anger.”
That arc was intentional, to avoid any Lolita-ification of these relationship dynamics. “It shouldn’t be glamourized or romanticized in any way, shape or form,” McCurdy said. “I wanted to show somebody young, bold and brazen, who really is a pursuer in so many ways. But even if we’re watching her throw herself headfirst at this man, ultimately, he’s 40. No matter what she does or how much she throws herself at him, he’s 40.”
One of the novel’s central ideas is what McCurdy calls “messy empowerment.” “So often, as women, we are spoon-fed ‘rah-rah’ empowerment that has no substance or real meaning,” she said. “Waldo, though caught up in this male-centric world, eventually, at 17, comes to find her own voice and can stand on her own two feet in a way that is very clumsy and is ugly at times. But I think this is far more believable, and important for people to see.”
Still, watching the romance unfold feels unsettling — the very feeling McCurdy wants us to confront because here, she sees the possibility of a reckoning. “I trust my readers can handle complex things,” she said. “I think oftentimes what happens in the presence of discomfort is there are conversations to be had, and there are opinions to be formed, and the discomfort forces you to sit and form one.” And, perhaps, that’s exactly where the power lies.
