Look, I'll be honest - I almost skipped this one. Celebrity memoirs aren't really my thing. I'm usually neck-deep in space operas or fantasy epics, not Hollywood tell-alls. But my wife had been raving about it for weeks, and I needed something short for a weekend of yard work. Six and a half hours? Perfect. What I didn't expect was to be standing in my garage, rake in hand, completely frozen because I couldn't stop listening.
Why You Need to Hear Jennette Tell This
Here's the thing about author-narrated memoirs - they can go either way. Sometimes you get someone who wrote a great book but sounds like they're reading a grocery list. Jennette McCurdy? She's a trained actor, obviously, but that's not what makes this work. It's that she's not performing the trauma. She's just... telling you. Like you're sitting across from her at a coffee shop and she's finally ready to talk about all of it.
Her voice has this warmth to it that makes the darker stuff hit even harder. When she's describing her mom showering her at sixteen - yeah, you read that right - there's no dramatic pause for effect. She just says it. Matter-of-fact. And somehow that restraint is way more devastating than any theatrical delivery would've been. The humor lands the same way. Dry, self-aware, almost like she's checking to see if you're still with her before she drops the next bomb.
The character voices are subtle but effective. Her mom comes through clearly - that particular brand of controlling sweetness that makes your skin crawl. And when she's recounting conversations with "The Creator" (pretty clearly Dan Schneider, though she never names him), you can hear the discomfort in how she phrases things. It's not voice acting. It's memory.
The Weight of What She's Actually Saying
So here's where I have to step outside my usual sci-fi comfort zone. This book covers eating disorders, emotional abuse, addiction, and some genuinely disturbing parent-child boundary violations. I'm a dad. I've got two kids. There were moments I had to pause and just... process. Not because it was gratuitous - McCurdy is actually pretty restrained in how she presents everything - but because the matter-of-fact delivery makes you realize this was just her normal.
The calorie restriction stuff is brutal. The way her mom framed starvation as "calorie restriction" and made it sound reasonable. The weigh-ins five times a day. The way Jennette internalized all of it as love. As someone who's spent decades consuming fiction about dystopias and mind control, reading about real psychological manipulation happening to a child actor in broad daylight hit different.
But here's what makes this more than just a trauma dump - she's genuinely funny. Dark funny, yeah, but funny. The bit about her mom getting on a first-name basis with paparazzi? The absurdity of her entire childhood being orchestrated around her mom's unfulfilled dreams? She finds the dark comedy in all of it without minimizing what it cost her.
The Listening Experience
At 6 hours and 26 minutes, this is basically two commutes for me. I burned through it in a weekend - partly yard work, partly just sitting in my car in the driveway because I couldn't bring myself to pause. The pacing is tight. No meandering, no filler. Each chapter is short and punchy, which works great for audio.
The production quality is clean - no weird audio artifacts or volume inconsistencies that I noticed. Just Jennette's voice and the story. No music, no sound effects, which is exactly right for this kind of memoir. Anything else would've felt manipulative.
I listened at 1.0x, which I almost never do. Usually I'm at 1.25x minimum. But something about her delivery made me want to stay at normal speed. The pauses mean something. The breath before a revelation. Speeding it up would've felt like rushing through someone's therapy session.
Who This Is (and Isn't) For
Okay, real talk. If you grew up watching iCarly or Sam & Cat, this is going to recontextualize... everything. Fair warning. If you have any history with eating disorders or parental abuse, this could be triggering. McCurdy doesn't sensationalize, but she doesn't shy away either.
This isn't really a "fun" listen. It's compelling, it's well-crafted, and it's important - but you're not going to feel good afterward. You're going to feel like you understand something about child stardom and toxic parenting that you didn't before. Whether that's worth your six hours depends on what you're looking for.
For my fellow sci-fi/fantasy people who wandered over here: think of it like a first-person account from inside a dystopia. Except the dystopia is the Hollywood child star machine, and there's no chosen one coming to save anyone. Just a woman who eventually saved herself.
Final Thoughts
I started this review saying celebrity memoirs aren't my thing. I stand corrected. Bad celebrity memoirs aren't my thing. This is something else entirely - a genuine piece of writing about survival, identity, and what it means to finally want things for yourself after a lifetime of being someone else's project.
Jennette McCurdy narrating her own story isn't just a nice touch. It's essential. You need to hear her voice crack slightly when she talks about her mom's death. You need to hear the complicated mix of grief and relief that the title promises. Reading it on the page would work. But hearing it? That's the full experience.
(And yes, I immediately texted my wife to apologize for taking so long to listen. She was right. She's usually right. Don't tell her I said that.)
