"Half His Age" and the Relationships We’re Still Untangling

I finished Half His Age in two nights — the kind where you look up, it’s past midnight, and you’re already tired for tomorrow. If you read I’m Glad My Mom Died and immediately decided Jeannette McCurdy could write anything and you’d follow... same.

I loved it. Then I read the reviews and had that familiar reaction when something hits a little too close to home and the internet starts picking it apart.

The premise is uncomfortable by design: a high school teacher, a student, an affair. People are calling it gratuitous, irresponsible, unnecessary. And I understand the instinct to recoil. We want stories like this to tell us exactly how to feel.

But that’s not what she’s doing.

McCurdy has spoken openly about being in a relationship with an older man when she was 18 — someone with power over her, someone who should have known better. Half His Age is her processing that experience through fiction, which is what writers do with the things that are too sharp to hold any other way. The discomfort isn’t incidental; it’s the whole point.

What she captures — the way a young woman can mistake control for love, intensity for intimacy, attention from the wrong person for proof of her own worth — isn’t gross. It’s familiar. It happens constantly, quietly, to girls who grow up to be women still untangling it decades later. (I don’t know many of us who don’t have some version of that story.)

Brilliant coming-of-age stories are rarely comfortable. The ones that stay with you usually aren’t. And maybe the urge to look away says more about us than it does about the book.