Review of Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy

McCurdy translates the singular voice she displayed in her candid, darkly funny memoir into fiction with a story about a taboo relationship that serves as a catalyst for an increasingly strong young protagonist to reject what doesn't work for her and move forward with her life.

McCurdy's unique voice came through loud and clear in her personal, unflinching memoir I'm Glad My Mom Died.

The premise of her debut novel Half His Age made me cringe, and I wasn't sure I was going to ultimately be able to read it, but I wanted to find out how McCurdy's significant command of narrative nonfiction storytelling would translate into fiction.

Waldo is a seventeen-year-old senior working at Victoria's Secret after school, binge-buying cheap clothing online to fill the emotional void she often feels, and often sleeping alone in the trailer where she lives with her often-absent, man-crazy mother.

She becomes wildly, lustily fixated on Mr. Korgy, her fortysomething, married creative writing teacher who shows her hints of encouragement in her work.

McCurdy plunges the reader into a fascinating, deeply uncomfortable scenario in which Waldo, a young woman--legally underage at 17 when the story and relationship begins and certainly morally off-limits regardless of her official age--aggressively, sexually pursues the one character in the book who inspires her and seems to believe in her creativity, intellectual ability, and promise: her off-limits high school teacher.

Waldo is eager for affection but in many ways is not a desperate young woman, nor is she gleefully testing the limits of the power of her sexuality. She is an untapped well of deep thought; she is an alternative mind in a small town seemingly without alternatives to the mainstream; and in terms of self-sufficiency and practicality, she is somewhat of an older soul in a nubile young body.

Yet her youth--or at least her youthful fallibility--comes through in her frequent, obsessive online shopping. She realizes she cannot afford to do this, and sometimes she fills her cart without clicking through to pay, but she recognizes the act provides stimulation and dopamine hits she yearns for. She recognizes the shame spiral she creates with her buying-and-returning cycle (she feels that returning the cheap items comes with judgment about her income and class), but until she's in an all-encompassing situation with Mr. Korgy, this shopping is a frequent crutch.

In Half His Age McCurdy offers a complicated story about an illegal, inappropriate, mystifying, all-encompassing obsession. But the book is primarily about Waldo and her path forward. I had the feeling that if it hadn't been Mr. Korgy, Waldo would have wrestled with some other testing force, and it felt clear that she was always destined to emerge from a messy scenario as more fully herself, stronger, and increasingly determined.

If--and this is an enormous if--we can consider the legal and moral atrocities of the relationship that drives the book somehow separately and compartmentalized from the story, it's clear that Half His Age features a strong main character who moves past sex, a desire for love, and a need for affection as the drivers of her actions. We watch Waldo (within a consensual but morally horrifying relationship) grow into herself as a young woman who knows what she wants, understands that her life could be expansive and hopeful, and recognizes that she can shed what is holding her back: limiting people, class judgment, poverty, and a lack of knowledge about the vast possibilities out there.

McCurdy ultimately challenges the reader to see past the erotic relationship to the person Waldo is and the person Waldo becomes. Waldo wants what she wants--a grown-up relationship with someone who knows about culture and literature, someone who believes in her. She isn't allowed to desire Mr. Korgy (who she calls "Mr. Korgy" throughout the book, eeks), and he isn't allowed to accept her advances, yet they each do. But most importantly to me as a reader, as Waldo more fully lives into herself, Mr. Korgy, who takes up so much of her emotional energy and so much page time in the book, ultimately seems destined to fade away as a blip on her radar screen; while he has imploded his life and show himself to be small-minded, immature, and shallow, his presence in Waldo's life is a catalyst for the changes that take her away from her small existence and out into the world.

McCurdy offers powerful, darkly funny, and suprisingly poignant moments with an edge. In Half His Age, she builds outstanding storytelling around a taboo, discomfiting situation.

I listened to a prepublication version of Half His Age, which is wonderfully narrated by Jennette McCurdy, courtesy of Libro.fm and Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group.

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You can click this link for my Bossy review of I'm Glad My Mom Died. On the blog you can also find Bossy reviews of books about forbidden love, unconventional relationships, and books that intrigued while making me uncomfortable.