This Friends actor is set to star in I'm Glad My Mom Died – read the book behind the series
But it was her 2022 memoir, I'm Glad My Mom Died, which revealed a darker side to her fame. In the boldly titled book, she recounts her dysfunctional childhood of emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her narcissistic mother.
Expertly balancing humour and heartache, the memoir lasted more than 80 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and garnered critical acclaim. Unsurprisingly, the rights to the book were snapped up by Apple TV.
Now, it's been announced that Jennifer Aniston is set to star in the 10-episode series inspired by McCurdy's memoir. While other details are thin on the ground, Apple TV describes the upcoming show as a 'heartbreaking and hilarious recounting of Jennette McCurdy's struggles as a former child actor while dealing with her overbearing, domineering mother.
'The dramedy will centre on the codependent relationship between an 18-year-old actress in a hit kids' show, and her narcissistic mother who relishes in her identity as 'a starlet's mother.''
The adaptation will likely stay true to its source material, with McCurdy signed on as co-writer, executive producer and showrunner alongside Ari Katcher. Excitingly, Aniston and Bad Sisters' Sharon Horgan are also listed as executive producers.
With the rest of the cast yet to be announced, it could be years until the TV adaptation arrives on our screens. In the meantime, here's everything you need to know about McCurdy's memoir, I'm Glad My Mom Died.
Part exposé on the perils of child fame and part reckoning with the relationship with her mother, I'm Glad My Mom Died secured a spot in my review of the best memoirs and autobiographies. The provocative opening of the book sees McCurdy at her mother Debra's hospital bedside. She's got cancer and is in a coma - in a bid to wake her, McCurdy whispers, 'Mommy, I am... so skinny right now.' What follows is the Nickelodeon star recounting her dysfunctional childhood with her cruel and narcissistic mother, who failed at her own acting career.
Despite her comic roles on screen, behind the scenes, McCurdy was depressed and anxious, suffering from disordered eating and alcohol abuse in her teens. In the book, McCurdy reveals how her mother forced her to diet and wouldn't let her shower alone until she was 18 years old. It wasn't until her mother died in 2013 that she understood the abuse she had suffered. This could be a depressingly sad memoir in anyone else's hands, but McCurdy's skill for storytelling and dark humour balances the bleakness of her story. Ultimately, it's about abuse masquerading as love. McCurdy's narration of the audiobook adds further depth to her story – it's well worth a listen.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Sun
33 minutes ago
- The Sun
Cruz Beckham's girlfriend Jackie reveals huge spine scar in slinky dress after life-changing scoliosis surgery
CRUZ Beckham's girlfriend Jackie Apostel has revealed her huge spine scar as she posed in a slinky dress after having life-changing scoliosis surgery. The son of David and Victoria Beckham, 20, has been dating stunning Jackie, 29, since last year, and he is supporting her through her health journey. 7 7 7 7 Today, Jackie bravely opened up about her scoliosis journey, which saw her having surgery. She shared a slew of pictures which showed her in hospital having the life-changing operation. In one of the pictures she is wearing a gold slinky dress, and shows fans what her scar looks like now, a year on from surgery. Writing next to the pics, Jackie bravely said: "1 year ago today I had my scoliosis surgery so we're celebrating with a big dress and an AI painting sitting here reflecting a little bit and weirdly I went into this day last year with zero fear. "I fully pranked my mind into thinking it was no big deal. The 2 weeks after that were absolute hell but I think what really kept me going was having something to go back to. "I was determined to be back in the studio no more than 1 month to the day post op. 25 days later we were back." Continuing she said: "I would have never ever made it through those 2 weeks if I wasn't surrounded by so much support and love. people go through far worse than this every day and in times where you're physically and mentally weak you really realize what a crazy difference conversation and comfort can have on you. "Having someone check on you all the time, help you, love you. A year later, most days I forget I even did it." She then went on to talk about her recovery, and thanked her love ones for their support. Jackie ended the lengthy post with: "From whatever it is you're going through. Watch sweet moment Cruz Beckham and girlfriend Jackie perform at dad David's 50th birthday amid feud with brother Brooklyn "Those are my 2 humble thoughts of the day and check in on your people always. "It could be making the biggest difference and you don't even know." POSH AND BECKS APPROVAL Cruz and Jackie have been together since April last year, and she has a good relationship with his famous parents. This is in stark contrast to his brother Brooklyn, 26, and wife Nicola Peltz, 30, who are locked in a feud with his parents after they missed David's 50th birthday celebrations in May. But Cruz and Jackie were there — and even performed Dolly Parton classic Islands in the Stream at a family dinner. Jackie appears to have been accepted into the Beckham clan as she spent Christmas with the family at their £60million waterfront mansion in Miami. She also supported Victoria at her fashion show during Paris Fashion Week last September, and even wore her £990 cream satin cami gown to her runway show. Jackie was previously part of the Brazilian girl band Schutz, and she gained more than one million plays on her first EP – Reformation a side. 7 GLASTONBURY FUN Cruz and Jackie have just got back from Glastonbury, but they didn't slum it with the rest of the festival goers. As you would expect, the couple lived the high life at the festival in one of the camp's most expensive and private VIP tents which cost around £9K. Sharing a slew of snaps from inside their tent - which closely resembled an A-list hotel room - it was clear that the pair had checked themselves into Camp Kerala. This luxury camp includes Shikar tents which came complete with a luxury king-size bed, their own private en-suite toilet and shower block. In one snap the couple could be seen enjoying a breakfast in bed with their food served on a wooden slate - a far cry from the realities of being in one of the Somerset festival's regular camps. 7
The Guardian
42 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Kesha: . (Period) review – a smart, funny return to her hedonistic hot-mess persona
Kesha Sebert has described her sixth album . (referred to hereafter as Period) as 'the first album I've made where I felt truly free'. It comes accompanied by a lengthy world tour, advertised by a photo in which the singer expresses her freedom – in what you have to say is a very Kesha-like manner – by riding a jetski while topless. Long-term observers of her turbulent career may note that this doesn't seem so different from the way she framed her third album, 2017's Rainbow, which she described at the time as 'truly saving my life', and featured her on the cover naked and was accompanied by a tour called Fuck the World. But it would be remiss to deny her the ability to make a similar point again. Rainbow was released at the height of her legal battle with her former producer 'Dr' Luke Gottwald. Kesha had accused him of sexual assault and other allegations, which he denied, resulting in a series of lawsuits and countersuits. Although alternative producers were found to work on Rainbow, she was still legally obliged to release the album – and its two successors – on Gottwald's Kemosabe label. The two reached a settlement in 2023, her contract with Kemosabe expired shortly afterwards, and Period is now released on her own label. While Rainbow and its immediate follow-ups regularly mined the legal disputes and resulting trauma for lyrical inspiration – a dramatic shift from the screw-you hedonism that powered her big hits in the early 2010s – Period signals a fresh start by, more or less, bringing back the Kesha who boasted about brushing her teeth with Jack Daniel's and took to the stage accompanied by dancers dressed as giant penises. Only the piano ballad closer Cathedral seems entirely rooted in recent events – 'Life was so lethal … I died in the hell so I could start living again'. Elsewhere, the occasional hint of something dark in the author's past ('I earned the right to be like this') is drowned out by the sound of Kesha reverting to type in no uncertain terms: 'take me to the sex shop', 'bartender pour me up some damn fluid', 'I like chaos, dripping head to toe', 'gimme gimme gimme all the boys'. And who can blame her? No one wants to be defined by trauma, and she's doubtless keen to assert that the original Kesha persona was more to do with her than the svengali-like producer who discovered her. Furthermore, it's a weirdly timely return. In 2010, Kesha's hot mess persona made her an outlier, albeit an outlier whose debut single TiK ToK sold 14m digital copies worldwide. The critic Simon Reynolds smartly noted that if the era's predominant female star Lady Gaga saw her work as high-concept art-pop in a lineage that included David Bowie and Roxy Music, Kesha was more like their glam-era rival Alice Cooper. Fifteen years on, we live in a pop world at least partly defined by Charli xcx's last album. Perpetually half-cut and lusty, open about her messy failings ('I like the bizarre type, the lowlife … God, I love a hopeless bastard,' she sings of her taste in men on Red Flag), Kesha could make a fair claim to be a godmother of Brat. Certainly, you couldn't accuse her of jumping on a latter-day trend, just as Period's diversion into vogue-ish country-pop, Yippee-Ki-Yay, seems less craven than it might. Kesha has done past work in that area – from her 2013 Pitbull collaboration Timber to her duet with Dolly Parton on Rainbow. Yippee-Ki-Yay's country-facing sound sits among a buffet of current pop styles: there's synthy, 80s-leaning pop-rock you could imagine Taylor Swift singing on Delusional and Too Hard, and mid-tempo disco on Love Forever, while the spectre of hyperpop haunts the warp-speed Boy Crazy and Hudson Mohawke turns up glitchy Auto-Tune-heavy electro on Glow. It's an album clearly intended to re-establish Kesha at the heart of pop, which means there's no room for the appealing weirdness of her 2023 single Eat the Acid, and it's only on the closing Cathedral that her voice really shifts into the full-throttle roar she unleashed covering T Rex's Children of the Revolution at 2022's Taylor Hawkins tribute concert. That said, the songs are all really strong, filled with smart little twists and drops, and funny, self-referential lines: 'You're on TikTok / I'm the fucking OG.' You get the sense of the massed ranks of collaborators – including everyone from regular Father John Misty foil Jonathan Wilson to Madison Love, who counts Blackpink and Addison Rae among her songwriting clients – really getting behind her to make Period a success. Kesha, meanwhile, plays the part of Kesha 1.0 to perfection: for all the lurid lyrical excesses, it never feels as if she's trying too hard. And why would it: she's returning to a role she originated. Lathe of Heaven – Aurora Cognitive dissonance: Lathe of Heaven look weirdly like a new wave of British heavy metal band, but Aurora's sound is equal parts smeary shoegazing and epic early 80s synth-pop. Great song regardless.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Todd Chrisley reveals jailhouse confrontation with star who 'talked smack' about daughter Savannah
Todd Chrisley has revealed he clashed with a very well-known prison inmate who dared to criticize his daughter Savannah's efforts to secure his release. The former jailbird, 56, who alongside wife Julie was granted a presidential pardon by Donald Trump last month, laid into 'Varsity Blues' college admissions scam mastermind Rick Singer in a candid interview on Savannah's Unlocked podcast. The Chrisley Knows Best stars served time for bank fraud and tax evasion - with Todd memorably crossing paths with Singer at Pensacola's Federal Prison Camp. Referring only to Singer as the 'college admissions guy' and a 'snitch', Chrisley fumed: 'He was talking s*** about Savannah, because that's when she had already started, you know, pulling the Barbara Walters and exposing everything in the [Bureau of Prisons]. 'He started talking smack. I said, "I will rip your head off and s*** down your neck if you talk about my child again." And I meant what I said.' In January 2023 Singer was sentenced to three and a half years in prison after pleading guilty in 2019 to racketeering, money laundering and obstruction charges. The court heard he accepted bribes totaling more than $25 million from desperate parents - including celebrities such as Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman - who wanted to get their kids into some of the country's best schools. In August 2024 he was released to a halfway house near Los Angeles to serve the rest of his sentence. This comes after Todd and Julie finally reunited and are now sharing the emotional details in a new interview with ABC News Studios, where they reflected on seeing each other for the first time in years. 'I was a little nervous,' Julie, 52, said about her reunion with Todd during the interview. 'Just because, you know, you think, "Oh my gosh, I've been away this long." But then, when I saw him, it was as if no time had passed.' Todd, 56, said that the idea of reuniting felt 'weird,' because he never really considered that he and Julie were 'apart.' 'And you know for me, it's just weird, because she was never away from me,' he explained. 'Even the whole time we were apart. She was with me every second, every breath that I took.' Todd continued: 'I mean, when I saw her, I was grateful to wrap my arms around her, but it was just more like, "I'm home."' Julie added that there was 'laughter and tears' at their reunion, which was filmed. Todd chimed in, 'A lot of that came after the cameras were not on.' And after so much time apart, the first thing Todd and Julie did together was have dinner with their family. Todd said, 'You know, we get to start over,' before saying that sleeping in his own bed again was 'heaven.' Both of them agreed that being able to shower at the leisure, without shower shoes, was thrilling. 'It was almost like your first sexual encounter. That good,' Todd joked. But the most emotional part of coming home was reuniting with their daughter Chloe, 12. 'You know, even though we had gotten to see each other [during visitations], it's not the same as when you're home,' Julie said. 'On our way home, she was literally watching on her phone — she was tracking where we were — to know how close I was. So I think it was just — it was a special moment,' she continued. Todd also recently shared the thoughts running through his mind when he and his wife were sentenced. 'I remember going in and that night, I was so angry with God and that night when the lights went out, I literally cried myself to sleep because it's the first time Julie and I have ever been away from each other since we had been married,' the Chrisley patriarch told Lara Trump. 'I'd never not been in that house when my kids woke up in the morning or when they went to bed at night,' Chrisley recalled. He was sentenced to 12 years - which was later knocked down to 10 - and served time at the Pensacola Federal Prison Camp in Florida, while wife Julie was imprisoned three states away at the Federal Medical Center Lexington in Kentucky. 'And I just said, God, why?' Chrisley continued. 'I've tried to be a loyal and faithful servant.' 'Why are you allowing this to happen? You know these things are not true,' he said. Prosecutors pushed that the Chrisleys had used false documents and exaggerated financial statements to secure more than $30 million in loans, which they used to fund their lavish lifestyle, which was on full display on their reality TV show that went on for 10 seasons. 'And in my dream, God came to me and he said that I have planted you where I need you and when you leave, they will rise,' Chrisley recounted. 'I look back on that dream now and I now understand when he said "when you leave they will rise" because they're rising through President Trump,' the former reality TV star said. 'So I am grateful for that.'
