Category: Vol. 5, No. 2

by Ronja Iding

Many of us grew up watching Nickelodeon shows like iCarly or Sam and Cat. I’m sure many of us even fantasized about what it would be like to be a child star on these shows. Having tons of money, fans, and fun with your co-stars, going to parties, and getting free stuff wherever you go. But Jennette McCurdy, who spent a significant amount of her childhood portraying Sam Puckett, had no easy life behind the scenes. Growing up with a narcissistic hoarder mom, who struggled with cancer on and off throughout Jennette’s entire childhood and who encouraged her to develop an eating disorder left her with a lot of childhood trauma. In her memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died” McCurdy opens up about just how much trauma she had to endure.

At the tender age of six, Jennette was put into acting to fulfil her mother’s lifelong dream of becoming a star. Although acting was never Jennette’s dream, she quickly recognized that she had to do it to keep her mom happy. “I think she wanted me to have a better life than she had, but I also think her approach was very unhealthy and informed by her own lack of self-work and she lived vicariously through me.” Jennette says in an interview with ABC News.

            Jennette’s family always struggled financially, and like a lot of child stars her acting paid the bills. By the age of eleven, Jennette had become the main source of income for her entire family, which included her three older brothers, parents, and maternal grandparents. They lived in a smelly hoarder house due to her mother’s mental illness, and the children slept on mats in the living room. “It felt like a lot of pressure, and then I think my mom saw my career as a way out of that life, of that way of living, of that constant grind.” Jennette explains.

            Jennette’s mom started teaching her about calorie restriction around the same time. To keep her small and childlike this dangerous way of eating became a habit. Jennette reflects, “I think my mom wanted to keep me as controllable as possible. I think she really wanted to have her influence on me and me growing up was a threat to that.” Living with a mother that encouraged and conditioned her anorexia was not the end of the abuse. Jennette, along with her youngest older brother, was showered by her mother until she was seventeen. She would even shower them together, leaving her children with more trauma.

            Along with the trauma she had to endure at home, Jennette was thrown into the spotlight as a child star, leaving her even more confused, “You’re playing an adult’s game, you’re in an adult’s world, and you don’t recognize that. You’re incapable of being on that level, but you are confused, and you think that you are.” Jennette tried to quit acting a few times, but quickly stopped once her mother started frantically crying and yelling.

            Her mother’s first cancer diagnosis happened when Jennette was only two years old. Ever since then, the family had lived in fear of her cancer coming back. Eventually, when Jennette was eighteen, it did. Not too long after, when Jennette was twenty-one, Deborah McCurdy died.

            Right after her mother’s death, Jennette developed both drinking problems, as well as bulimia. She started binge eating and throwing everything up due to a guilty conscience. She closed herself off to the world due to her pain, trauma, and confusion.

Even after her mom died, it took a lot of time until Jennette was able to address the abuse, she had been enduring her entire life. “I couldn’t initially accept the idea that my mother was abusive toward me because my whole life […] I was operating through this lens of my mom wants what’s best for me even after she died. I’m nothing without my mom. […] Accepting that she was abusive would have meant reframing my entire life.” She went through several therapists to seek help for her eating disorder and trauma and eventually quit acting to focus on her health and to figure out what she wanted. Today she is able to identify her mom’s behavior as, “violent and erratic unstable”.

Today Jennette reflects on her decisions after her mother’s death and says, “I’m proud of myself. I think I’ve chosen a path of integrity, and it hasn’t always been easy.”

            There is a lot more to unpack in her memoir concerning Nickelodeon, child stardom, how these networks operate behind the scenes and luckily her friendship with one specific costar that helped her grow and heal throughout the years. Her writing style is refreshing and makes it easy to read the whole thing in one sitting, while also leaving you with a whirlwind of emotions. If you want to know more, I recommend having a read through it.

Author bio: Ronja studies Anglophone Studies and Kommunikationswissenschaft at UDE. When she’s not watching movies or reading books, she writes her own stories or plays ice hockey.

by Christian Krumm

The title of this text refers to an old song by the band Genesis. The song tells the story of a legendary man who is chosen to be a leader heading an army of soldiers into a war of fortune. Nowadays it might not be everyone’s most famous purpose in life to do something like this. But in most people’s lives, especially in writing, it is the question remains: Am I the chosen one? Is it me who can be successful with my own stories, written from the bottom of my heart, revealing my most private and intimate thoughts? There are so many others doing the same thing as me. And if I am brave enough to publish, will I be heard or hurt by people after they have read my story?

After surviving the first light and humble moments in writing, those questions arise like phantoms in almost everyone’s head. Did I say almost everyone? That is wrong. Everyone experiences these kinds of feelings. It is fear and shame that makes us think something we wrote is too embarrassing, too intimate or leaves the reader with an inaccurate impression of ourselves.

In that particular moment we stop writing and start thinking. Most people think their lives are ordinary – boring even. And in one sense, they are correct: Life is not possible without constantly compromising. This behaviour is expected and it is necessary in modern societies. So, if we get unsure about what we should write, our thoughts tell us that we should behave in writing in the way that is most successful in living. We start to compromise, start to write something which we think people expect from us and so we hide what is really deep down inside us.

But what matters is this: Feeling comes before thinking. Just imagine not only you but everyone around you behaving the way I pointed out above. That means everyone tries to cooperate, compromise, and conform – and above all, to hide whatever seems to set themselves apart. That means that for most of our daily lives, we’ll be meeting people who behave according to what they think, not what they feel. But by reading a story, even your story, they want to escape from the world of thinking and enter the world of feeling. In this world no life is ordinary. Feeling is what really connects people; it makes them overcome all the thinking and makes them say something like: I love you; I admire you for something you do; even: I hate you for something you have done to me. Feeling can change the world of one person the way all thinking never could. And this is exactly what makes a story interesting, fascinating and even unique.

So back to our first question: Are you the chosen one to do that? Of course you are, because, honestly, nobody is. Who will choose you, if you don’t choose yourself? If you write down your real-life feelings, turn them into a story, fantasy, thriller, crime or romance, you will find your reads: people who fell the way you do. You will find people who share the feelings you wrote about. And people will love you for that.

So sit down and write the story of your feelings in life. Write about people you love, you hate, you adore or you feel pity for. Give them fantastic names and abilities, let them suffer or find their luck. Take off the shame and the fear of what other people might think about you after reading your text. You will offer them feelings they don’t experience in their lives. And that is what reading makes the act of reading so fascinating.

So, stop thinking. Start writing. Start feeling. Write the story of your life.

Author bio: Christian Krumm is a writer of novels and short stories. He teaches creative writing at the Universität Duisburg-Essen.