‘Half His Age’: Jennette McCurdy’s novel is an uncomfortable take on a new genre, literary abuse
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Knowledge is power, so the saying goes – and where there is power, there is abuse. At 18, former child star Jennette McCurdy commenced a secret romance with a 32-year-old co-worker on the set of Nickelodeon’s iCarly. While McCurdy stops short of calling it abuse, she has since described the relationship as “creepy” and “twisted”.
McCurdy’s debut novel, Half His Age, follows 17-year-old Waldo as she pursues a relationship with her 40-year-old creative writing teacher, Mr Korgy.
This post-#MeToo novel is a compelling new entry in dark academia, a popular genre obsessed with power and its corruptions. It dissects intellectual elitism and moral decay within the hierarchies of schools and universities.
“I’ve been fantasising about him all class,” Waldo confesses. “Fantasies I didn’t even know I had about things I didn’t even know I wanted.”
Gross and gripping, the novel refuses to moralise, but simmers with a barely concealed anger – fitting for a writer who describes rage as “one of the most, if not the most, useful emotions”.
In a recent interview, McCurdy said: “Any time I’ve felt genuine rage about something, it’s put my life on a corrective path that I have never looked back from.”
Half His Age is an uncomfortable read, but it resists easy categorisation. It’s not a neat narrative of sexual abuse. Nor is it...