Reading List

Authors Like Jennette McCurdy

Q: Who should I read if I love Jennette McCurdy?

Mara Wilson's Where Am I Now? is the closest: another child actor who lost her mother young and became a writer. Britney Spears's The Woman in Me covers a family controlling a famous daughter's life. Jeannette Walls and Mary Karr wrote the darkly funny family memoirs McCurdy's book descends from, and Kiese Laymon's Heavy treats food, the body and a mother with the same honesty.

Q: What books are like I'm Glad My Mom Died?

On child fame: Mara Wilson's Where Am I Now? (2016) and Britney Spears's The Woman in Me (2023). On a damaging parent, told with humour: Mary Karr's The Liars' Club (1995) and Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle (2005). On eating disorders: Marya Hornbacher's Wasted. On leaving a family's version of reality: Tara Westover's Educated (2018).

Q: Has Jennette McCurdy written another book?

Yes. Her first novel, Half His Age, was published by Ballantine on 20 January 2026. It follows Waldo, a seventeen-year-old in Anchorage, Alaska, who begins an affair with her married creative-writing teacher, and it debuted at number two on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list.

Q: What should I read after Educated if I liked I'm Glad My Mom Died?

Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club are the two books most often read alongside both: childhood memoirs about parents who did harm, told without self-pity. For the body and appetite side of McCurdy's book, add Kiese Laymon's Heavy.

Jennette McCurdy started acting at eight, on MADtv, because her mother wanted her to, and from 2007 to 2012 she played Sam Puckett on Nickelodeon's iCarly. Her mother, Debra, died of cancer in 2013; McCurdy quit acting a few years later and turned to writing, first as a one-woman show and then, in August 2022, as I'm Glad My Mom Died. The book sold more than 200,000 copies in its first week and spent over sixty weeks on the New York Times list. It is split into “Before” and “After” her mother's death, and what readers come for is the voice: flat, present-tense, very funny, describing calorie counting at eleven, a mother who showered her into her teens, and a career she never chose, without asking anyone to feel sorry for her. In January 2026 she published a first novel, Half His Age. The writers below share either her subject — a childhood shaped by someone else's needs, the body as the place the damage shows, fame that arrived before consent was possible — or her method: the worst material told straight, with the jokes left in.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Child stardom · Family memoir · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Jennette McCurdy, start with Mara Wilson, another child actor who lost her mother young and wrote her way out. For a parent controlling a famous daughter's life, read Britney Spears. For the dark comedy of a chaotic family, Jeannette Walls and Mary Karr. And for food, weight and a mother's love written as one subject, Kiese Laymon's Heavy.

10 authors like Jennette McCurdy

Closest match · Child actor turned writer

Mara Wilson

American · b. 1987 · Memoirist and actor

Wilson was Natalie in Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) and the title role in Matilda (1996); her mother died of breast cancer in April 1996, the year Matilda came out, and she stopped acting in films after 2000. Where Am I Now? True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame (2016) is a book of essays about growing up famous, anxiety and OCD, and what happens to a child star who stops being cute. In February 2021 she wrote a New York Times essay comparing her own childhood fame to Britney Spears's.

The nearest book on the shelf to I'm Glad My Mom Died: a girl in front of the camera, a mother who dies young, and an adult who has to work out which parts of herself were ever hers. The difference is the mother. Wilson's was loved and protective, which makes the two books a useful pair — the same industry, seen from a safe home and from an unsafe one.

— Lisanne

A family that ran the career

Britney Spears

American · b. 1981 · Memoirist and singer

Spears began on The Mickey Mouse Club as a child and had her first number one at sixteen. From 2008 to 2021 she lived under a court-ordered conservatorship that gave her father control over her finances and much of her personal life. The Woman in Me was published by Gallery Books on 24 October 2023 and sold 1.1 million copies in the US in its first week; Michelle Williams read the audiobook.

Where McCurdy had a mother, Spears had a legal arrangement, but the story is recognisably the same one: a performer whose earnings supported a family that also controlled her body, her food and her time. Spears writes far less carefully than McCurdy — this is testimony, not craft — and it is the bluntness that makes it worth reading next to her.

— Lisanne

Every book by Britney Spears →

Fame, addiction and the joke as armour

Matthew Perry

Canadian-American · b. 1969 · Memoirist and actor

Perry played Chandler Bing on Friends and spent much of those years addicted to alcohol and opioids. Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, published by Flatiron in November 2022, describes his first drink at fourteen, years of rehab and a burst colon that left him in hospital for five months. He died in October 2023, at fifty-four, and the book went back to number one.

It came out three months after McCurdy's and was read by much the same people, and for good reason: both are sitcom stars writing about what the laugh track covered. Perry, like McCurdy, uses jokes as a reflex and then shows you the reflex. His book is looser and less shaped; hers is the better book, but his explains why the comedy is in hers.

— Lisanne

The eating disorder, from inside

Marya Hornbacher

American · b. 1974 · Memoirist

Hornbacher wrote Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia in her early twenties, about a fourteen-year struggle with eating disorders that began in childhood. Madness: A Bipolar Life (2008) is about the bipolar disorder diagnosed later. She has also written a novel and books on recovery and the twelve steps.

A large part of I'm Glad My Mom Died is about anorexia and bulimia, and Wasted is the book that does that subject at full length. Hornbacher is more lyrical and more clinical than McCurdy, and less funny, but she has the same refusal to make recovery sound tidy. Readers in recovery themselves should know it is detailed.

— Lisanne

A chaotic family, told deadpan

Jeannette Walls

American · b. 1960 · Memoirist and journalist

Walls was born in Phoenix and grew up moving between Arizona, California, Nevada and Welch, West Virginia, with an alcoholic father, an artist mother and periods of homelessness. She left for New York at seventeen and became a gossip columnist, writing the “Scoop” column for MSNBC.com until 2007. The Glass Castle (2005) had spent more than 400 weeks on the New York Times list by 2018.

The model for the kind of memoir McCurdy wrote: the child's-eye view, kept flat, with no adult commentary telling you how to feel. Walls's parents are harder to hate than Debra McCurdy, and that is the interest of reading the two together — both writers love the parent who failed them, and neither lets the love excuse it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jeannette Walls →

The mother memoir, done funny

Mary Karr

American · b. 1955 · Memoirist and poet

Karr grew up in an oil town in Southeast Texas with two alcoholic parents and a mother whose breakdowns turned violent. The Liars' Club (1995) won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award and helped start the memoir boom of the 1990s; Cherry (2000) covers her adolescence and Lit (2009) her own alcoholism and recovery. The Art of Memoir (2015) is her book about how the form works.

If what you loved in McCurdy was that a book about an abusive mother could make you laugh out loud, Karr is where that started. She is a poet and her sentences are richer, but the method is the same: the child's voice, the comic timing, and the slow reveal of how bad it was. Lit pairs with McCurdy's “After” half.

— Lisanne

Every book by Mary Karr →

Leaving the family that made you

Tara Westover

American · b. 1986 · Memoirist

Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a survivalist family, did not go to school, and first entered a classroom at seventeen at Brigham Young University; she went on to a PhD in history at Cambridge. Educated (2018) is about that education and the break with her family it cost. Her parents dispute her account: their lawyer said in 2018 that the book misrepresents them.

The setting could not be further from Nickelodeon, but the shape is McCurdy's: a parent's view of the world held as the only one, a child who believes it, and the slow, guilty work of seeing past it. Westover is more measured and less comic; both books end with a daughter choosing distance over reconciliation.

— Lisanne

Every book by Tara Westover →

Food, the body and a mother's love

Kiese Laymon

American · b. 1974 · Memoirist and novelist

Laymon grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, raised by his mother. Heavy: An American Memoir (2018), addressed to her, is about his weight, his gambling addiction, violence and growing up Black in the South. It won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction in 2019. It also won the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose.

The closest book to McCurdy on the body: eating and not eating as the way a child absorbs what is happening at home. Laymon's mother is far more loving than Debra McCurdy, but Heavy asks the same question — how to tell the truth about a parent without lying in either direction — and answers it with the same nerve.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kiese Laymon →

Abuse, told in a new form

Carmen Maria Machado

American · b. 1986 · Memoirist and story writer

Machado's first book, the story collection Her Body and Other Parties (2017), was a National Book Award finalist. In the Dream House (2019) is a memoir of an abusive relationship with another woman, written mostly in the second person, with each short chapter borrowing a different genre or trope. It won the Lambda Literary Award and the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize.

Machado and McCurdy both solve the same problem: how to write about being controlled by someone who loved you, when the plain version sounds unbelievable. McCurdy's answer is deadpan; Machado's is form, turning the story into a haunted house, a choose-your-own-adventure, a list. For readers who want the McCurdy subject with more literary risk.

— Lisanne

Every book by Carmen Maria Machado →

Girlhood, the body and consent

Melissa Febos

American · b. 1980 · Essayist and memoirist · National Book Critics Circle Award 2021

Febos grew up in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Whip Smart (2010) is a memoir of working as a dominatrix in New York while addicted to heroin; Abandon Me (2017) is about her birth father and a love affair. Girlhood (2021), essays on how girls learn to distrust their own bodies and wants, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

The essayist to read after McCurdy if what stayed with you was the body — the way a girl's appetite, shape and sexuality were managed by other people before she could have a view. Girlhood takes McCurdy's private story and shows it as a pattern. Body Work (2022) is Febos on how to write about your own life honestly, which is what McCurdy did.

— Lisanne

Every book by Melissa Febos →

Where to start if you loved Jennette McCurdy

If you want another child star's story, read Mara Wilson.

Where Am I Now?: Matilda, grown up, on what fame takes from a child.

If you want the same dark comedy about a mother, read Mary Karr.

The Liars' Club — the memoir that showed it could be funny.

If you want the body and the food, read Kiese Laymon.

Heavy: weight, hunger and a mother, told without flinching.

If you want it written as literature, read Carmen Maria Machado.

In the Dream House: control and love, in forty-odd forms.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Jennette McCurdy

Who should I read if I love Jennette McCurdy?

Mara Wilson's Where Am I Now? is the closest: another child actor who lost her mother young and became a writer. Britney Spears's The Woman in Me covers a family controlling a famous daughter's life. Jeannette Walls and Mary Karr wrote the darkly funny family memoirs McCurdy's book descends from, and Kiese Laymon's Heavy treats food, the body and a mother with the same honesty.

What books are like I'm Glad My Mom Died?

On child fame: Mara Wilson's Where Am I Now? (2016) and Britney Spears's The Woman in Me (2023). On a damaging parent, told with humour: Mary Karr's The Liars' Club (1995) and Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle (2005). On eating disorders: Marya Hornbacher's Wasted. On leaving a family's version of reality: Tara Westover's Educated (2018).

Is I'm Glad My Mom Died a true story?

Yes. It is a memoir, published by Simon & Schuster on 9 August 2022, about McCurdy's childhood acting career, her mother Debra, who died of cancer in 2013, and the years after. The title comes from a one-woman show McCurdy performed in Los Angeles and New York before turning the material into the book.

Has Jennette McCurdy written another book?

Yes. Her first novel, Half His Age, was published by Ballantine on 20 January 2026. It follows Waldo, a seventeen-year-old in Anchorage, Alaska, who begins an affair with her married creative-writing teacher, and it debuted at number two on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list.

Is I'm Glad My Mom Died being made into a TV series?

Apple TV+ ordered a ten-episode series inspired by the memoir in July 2025, created by McCurdy and Ari Katcher, who are co-showrunners, with Jennifer Aniston cast as the mother. A report in July 2026 said Aniston was leaving the project because of scheduling conflicts; no release date has been announced.

What should I read after Educated if I liked I'm Glad My Mom Died?

Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club are the two books most often read alongside both: childhood memoirs about parents who did harm, told without self-pity. For the body and appetite side of McCurdy's book, add Kiese Laymon's Heavy.

Footnotes

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Jennette McCurdy

10 authors like Jennette McCurdy

Mara Wilson

Britney Spears

Matthew Perry

Marya Hornbacher

Jeannette Walls

Mary Karr

Tara Westover

Kiese Laymon

Carmen Maria Machado

Melissa Febos

Where to start if you loved Jennette McCurdy

Frequently asked questions about authors like Jennette McCurdy

Who should I read if I love Jennette McCurdy?

What books are like I'm Glad My Mom Died?

Is I'm Glad My Mom Died a true story?

Has Jennette McCurdy written another book?

Is I'm Glad My Mom Died being made into a TV series?

What should I read after Educated if I liked I'm Glad My Mom Died?

Footnotes

Lisanne Swart

Thanks for reading,

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