Jennette McCurdy’s novel is an uncomfortable take on a new genre – literary abuse
- Written by Kate Cantrell, Senior Lecturer in Humanities, University of Southern Queensland
Knowledge is power, so the saying goes – and where there is power, there is abuse. At 18, former child star Jennette McCurdy commenced a secret romance with a 32-year-old co-worker on the set of Nickelodeon’s iCarly. While McCurdy stops short of calling it abuse, she has since described the relationship as “creepy” and “twisted”.
McCurdy’s debut novel, Half His Age, follows 17-year-old Waldo as she pursues a relationship with her 40-year-old creative writing teacher, Mr Korgy.
This post-#MeToo novel is a compelling new entry in dark academia, a popular genre obsessed with power and its corruptions. It dissects intellectual elitism and moral decay within the hierarchies of schools and universities.
“I’ve been fantasising about him all class,” Waldo confesses. “Fantasies I didn’t even know I had about things I didn’t even know I wanted.”
Gross and gripping, the novel refuses to moralise, but simmers with a barely concealed anger – fitting for a writer who describes rage as “one of the most, if not the most, useful emotions”.
In a recent interview, McCurdy said: “Any time I’ve felt genuine rage about something, it’s put my life on a corrective path that I have never looked back from.”
Half His Age is an uncomfortable read, but it resists easy categorisation. It’s not a neat narrative of sexual abuse. Nor is it a textbook tale of grooming. It reminds us there is no single, correct way for writers and readers to engage with stories about female desire and power.
Age-gap relationships
McCurdy’s memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, sold more than three million copies and is being adapted for an Apple TV+ series starring Jennifer Aniston.
In pacy, unsparing prose, McCurdy recounts how she was coerced into acting by her narcissistic mother – a mean, controlling woman who emotionally and physically abused her daughter. She introduced McCurdy to anorexia at 11, to delay puberty and secure more acting roles. Her mother’s hoarding was so severe, McCurdy and her brothers slept on mats in the living room.
McCurdy writes about her own age-gap relationship in her memoir:
My co-worker Joe […] keeps touching me. At first I couldn’t tell if it was an accident since I know he’s in his thirties and has a girlfriend, but now it’s happened so many times that I’m sure it’s on purpose. I say nothing because the truth is it feels nice.
While it would be a mistake to read McCurdy as Waldo, Half His Age is deeply infused with the author’s experience. “The sensation is exhilarating,” McCurdy’s memoir records, “In this moment, I know that one way or another, we’re going to be together.”
The fictional Waldo reaches the same conclusion: “It’s excruciating. Intoxicating. Inevitable. This kind of attraction. The kind that already knows I’m gonna be with him.”
When McCurdy’s mother discovers the relationship, her response is devastating:
Dear Net, I am so disappointed in you. You used to be my perfect little angel, but now you are nothing more than a little SLUT […] What happened to my good little girl? Where did she go? And who is the MONSTER that has replaced her?
Predatory professors
Dark academia teems with predatory teachers and professors, who groom and abuse vulnerable women and girls.
In Kate Walbert’s His Favorites, a teenage girl is coerced into a sexual relationship with her charismatic English teacher following a tragic accident in her hometown.
In Larissa Pham’s Discipline, a once-promising artist, Christine, reckons with her past after a ruinous affair with her much-older mentor, a painter of modest fame she later fictionalises and kills in a revenge fantasy. (“After I wrote the scene,” Christine reflects, “I realised that the book couldn’t end any other way.” “Sure, it makes sense,” her editor says, “but it feels unearned.”)
Strane is another predator who wields language as his weapon of choice. “Nessa,” he whispers, editing her poetry, “I have to ask, did you mean to sound sexy here?” Groping her in class, he insists, “You’re in charge here, Vanessa. You decide what we do.”
At first, the literary abuser manipulates language to convince his victim she is special – different to other girls, mature for her age. Then he manipulates the narrative to convince her she is the architect of her own abuse – and later, the cause of the pair’s demise.
As Waldo and Korgy’s relationship curdles into crushing mundanity, Waldo grows bored, and Korgy grows to resent her ambivalence.
“I knew this would happen,” he chides. “You’re a pursuer. A chaser. You want and you want and you want, and you’re fucking ravenous about it […] But then once you get what you want, you don’t want it anymore.”
Strane, too, blames Vanessa for her abuse: “I never would have done it if you weren’t so willing.”
Imperfect victims
Korgy and Strane join a long tradition of predatory professors – pathetic men who compensate for their professional futility with sexual predation. But Waldo is more complex.
She is not the perfect victim.
At the school dance – before her relationship with Korgy begins – she corners him in his office and comes on to him.
She fantasises about bottling his scent and spritzing herself, so she can smell like him: “pine and musk and the faintest whiff of BO”. In class, she imagines touching his paunch and licking the curly hairs on his belly.
Waldo’s attraction is instant: “so sudden it’s alarming, so palpable it’s confusing”. She is relentlessly aroused by him even as she registers his thinning hair and nose pores, his atrophied face “withered with the gross decay of middle-aged-ness”.
The grossness is not gratuitous.
That Waldo both desires Korgy and is repulsed by him forces us to acknowledge that her experience is both erotic and harmful. By dwelling uncomfortably in this ambivalence, McCurdy exposes the inadequacy of reductive cultural narratives about sexual abuse. She makes us sit with – rather than resolve – the complexity of Waldo’s experience.
Half His Age is compelling because it refuses to let the reader look away – from Waldo’s aggression and confusion, the slow erosion of boundaries and, ultimately, the quiet devastation of a girl who does not yet understand she is being harmed.
Waldo is not the victim we want her to be – and that is precisely the point. McCurdy does not ask us to judge her. She asks us to understand her – a far more difficult thing.
Authors: Kate Cantrell, Senior Lecturer in Humanities, University of Southern Queensland 
