Why You'll Love This
McCurdy's follow-up to her devastating memoir is a novel so raw and uncomfortable it feels like reading someone's secret journal — and you will not be able to look away.
- Great if you want: a messy, complicated female protagonist who doesn't apologize
- The experience: urgent and unsettling — reads fast but sits with you longer
- The writing: McCurdy weaponizes bluntness — short, sharp sentences that cut cleanly
- Skip if: you need likable characters or tidy moral conclusions
About This Book
Some desires don't make sense — and that's exactly what makes them dangerous. In Half His Age, Jennette McCurdy introduces Waldo, a young woman consumed by a ferocious, inexplicable want: her creative writing teacher, a man with a wife, a kid, and a life that looks nothing like hers. McCurdy isn't interested in easy explanations for why Waldo wants what she wants. Instead, she traces the raw, uncomfortable territory where desire, power, loneliness, and class collide — and asks what it costs a person to chase something they can't fully name or justify.
What makes this novel genuinely surprising is how McCurdy writes Waldo's interiority. The prose is blunt and restless, full of contradictions that feel true rather than constructed — Waldo is perceptive and naive in the same breath, sometimes within the same sentence. McCurdy resists the urge to moralize or soften, which gives the book a kind of honesty that's rare in fiction about female desire. Readers who loved I'm Glad My Mom Died for its unflinching self-examination will recognize that same refusal to look away — applied here to the messier, funnier, stranger terrain of wanting someone you probably shouldn't.
