Half His Age - Jennette Mccurdy [Review]

Half His Age follows Waldo, a 17-year-old girl having an affair with her married teacher, Mr Korgy. He is fat, ugly, and balding. Why am I mentioning this? Because McCurdy does, early and repeatedly, so I hope you aren’t tired of reading that just yet.

I blitzed through this, and if I wasn’t careful I could easily have mistaken that for enjoyment. In reality I think this book is simply short, compulsively readable, and written in a heavily narrative focused style. It moves fast from scene to scene. Things keep happening. People keep talking. But momentum is not a substitute for what I thought was missing.

What is missing here, for me, is any depth at all, in both the characters and the themes it appears to want to explore. Korgy is repeatedly presented as physically diminished, shabby, and distinctly unromantic, but the novel never really justifies why those details matter. Waldo’s life outside of him feels thin and limited to little more than shopping, wanting, waiting around to be wanted. Her life within the relationship is limited to little more than how horny she is for a man she finds physically degraded. This is clearly rooted in trauma, but Waldo’s damage is still only addressed in fleeting broad terms - shopping addiction, self-loathing, neglect, yearning, loneliness - rather than with any real psychological depth.

When I first heard about this book I remember wondering why we needed another My Dark Vanessa. That was unfair of me, really; there is always room for new takes on the same themes. The issue is that Half His Age seems so much less interested in exploring these themes than My Dark Vanessa ever was. That novel is disturbing because it is so precise about the psychology of abuse; the appeal of being chosen, the vanity of seeming older, the false sense of agency, the way a child can feel complicit in something she was never capable of consenting to. Half His Age, by contrast, often feels more interested in documenting the logistics of Waldo and Korgy’s sex life than in interrogating what that relationship is actually doing to her.

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I’m no prude, but I also found a lot of this needlessly provocative in a way that edged, at times, towards glamorisation. Sex scenes of this nature should make you wince because of the imbalance at their centre, because of the humiliation and manipulation running underneath them. Here, I often had the sense that the provocation was the point. Waldo never felt especially convincingly written as someone being groomed; more often she came across as self-destructive, infatuated, and oddly underexamined.

There are moments where Korgy clearly holds the power, and Waldo admits she will accept whatever scraps of him she can get, swallowing her feelings for fear of losing access to him at all. This never really felt intentional from Korgy, who didn’t seem particularly calculated (proven later when he is on his knees begging Waldo not to leave). It also makes the whole dynamic feel strangely flimsy. Any teacher in his position would, I imagine, be glad he doesn’t have to pay her off or murder her to keep their secret quiet.

I have no real sense of what the reception to this book has been, beyond the fact that I have seen it plastered everywhere. Perhaps that is partly down to how aggressively it is littered with references to apps, celebrities, brands, and internet culture which must’ve done wonders for its SEO. Sometimes that kind of thing can make a novel feel alive and specific, but here it mostly made me think about how quickly it will date (and the reference to BeReal proves it already seems to have done so from when it was first written).

I suppose there is an argument that many of the issues here are deliberate consequences of the first-person perspective. Waldo is seventeen; of course she focuses on the sex, on the things she thinks she wants, on the glamour she projects onto something she believes she is choosing. Of course she does not understand herself as being groomed, and of course the relationship is, from her point of view, half glorified and half misread in real time. Fine. But if that is the defence, I am still left wondering what the book is actually trying to say beyond that.

Which is a shame, because I really liked I’m Glad My Mom Died. McCurdy’s voice, with its dryness, sarcasm, and the millennial self-aware cruelty of some of her jokes, is very much to my taste. But here that voice is attached to a story that keeps gesturing towards trauma, grooming, and low self-worth without examining any of them especially well. I still have faith in her work, and I will absolutely read whatever she writes next, but this one didn’t work for me.

For more regular reading updates, shorter thoughts, and proof that I buy books faster than I read them, follow me on Instagram @adamkhanco.

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