A review by mejisilliterate
I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

5.0

Watching interviews McCurdy does about this book, she says that her as a child was innocent and unaware of the abuse and trauma she went through. Of course this is true, but at the same time I found that this book explored so well the subtle astuteness that all children have. They work on instinct, they pick up subtleties (memorizing her mother’s expressions, as just one example), they are smart and quick. But this leaves them vulnerable. Even though this is a nonfiction book, I find that many times authors when writing children, even when writing themselves, use an adult lens on that ‘character’, making the child naive to a point of blindness — but children are never blind. never. what this book does so well in my opinion is understand that children are also just people new to society, learning, observing, desiring to please the people they love, simultaneously slowly figuring out what love even is. and how abuse and manipulation from such a young age is one tiny loose screw that unscrews and unscrews until the machine falls apart.