Over the course of the years I have gather a certain amount of pretty pretentious friends. Some are music pretentious, some are movie pretentious, some are beer pretentious. For a while, I was book pretentious. The general attitude of these people tends to be “I am in the world, I am not of the world”.
This is really stupid.
I am reasonably sure I am the only person of my generation who has not watched one singular episode of Friends, and occasionally I tell people this and they look at me as if I had two heads. In that case, I am reasonably sure I didn’t miss much.
But at some point I got over the pretentiousness. It happened when I realized that not having any blessed clue what was going on keeps you from having fun. This was around when they were airing season 6 of Game of Thrones – a show or book series I had never heard of – and all my friends were going off to a bar with a big screen to watch the episodes as they aired. In the mean time, I was sat at home twiddling my thumbs. My then boss insisted I get caught up on the show, and by the next airing I was right there with them, and all the happier for it.
This overly long anecdote was just to say that a news story about a book is something that will get my attention, particularly when it’s one of those things that ‘everyone is talking about’. The brouhaha seems to all be in the title of this book alone. Frankly I don’t get it. We may be obliged to love, but liking our parents is optional. Some parents are awful people. The title alone does much to get me through having to do a plot synopsis. When we think ‘hollywood star’, the next words that come to our mind usually isn’t ‘garbage childhood’. Maybe it should. That’s the angle here at least. The book goes into pretty painful details of the road taken to become a child actress – largely at the mother’s behest – and the abuse (there really isn’t much of a better word to describe it) that Jennette McCurdy endured to get there. The cost seems high, and was payed with a normal childhood. Nor was this anything McCurdy seemed to want. She did this all because children love their parents, and she didn’t want to disappoint a mother living vicariously through her. Other humans didn’t help, as illustrated by the anecdote of the nurse who, when she recognizes McCurdy’s ‘character’ while she was sitting in the hospital next to her dying mother, insisted on getting a selfie.
I had no fucking idea who Jennette McCurdy was. After a quick scroll through her IMDB page, and I can be reasonably confident I have never seen her on screen. I likely won’t recognize her should I encounter her in a movie or series. That’s not how my brain works. Still, I am glad I read this book. One of life’s unfairnesses is that a story like this is likely pretty common, but it takes a celebrity for such a story to get any attention. Maybe the story will get more people to remember our children are not ours, and that we don’t have controlling rights over them.
This is not a happy book. It shows in pretty painful detail all the horrible things the author endured, and the author makes no effort to mask who is responsible.
Failures in Polymathy 