A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Teen girl falls for a high school creative writing teacher. That's the premise of the new novel, "Half His Age" by Jennette McCurdy. McCurdy was a child actor on Nickelodeon in the 2010s, and a few years ago, she became a bestselling author with her memoir, "I'm Glad My Mom Died." It was a bracing yet funny look at her relationship with her mother, her eating disorder, her time in Hollywood and a lot more. And while this new book is fiction, that doesn't make it any less personal. Here's NPR's Andrew Limbong.
ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: This story starts on a bullet train. The novel is set in Anchorage, Alaska, where there are no bullet trains, but Jennette McCurdy was on one in Japan when she got this overwhelming feeling.
JENNETTE MCCURDY: It was this full-body knowing that, OK, I'm going to write this book through the eyes of this young woman, this 17-year-old who turns 18, and then the idea of her being with her teacher was in place. But that was just the seed of it.
LIMBONG: At the time, McCurdy was 24. This was before she wrote the big memoir that would put her face on countless bookstore tables and Target shelves. But she put the novel idea on the back burner to write that memoir, which included details about a relationship she had with a man in his 30s when she was 18. Jump ahead a couple of years later, and the idea just kept coming back up.
MCCURDY: A couple drafts in, I was looking back at it and wondering, I was going, why this, why now? Like, I couldn't have answered that question then of why this idea was what was coming out. And I did realize, looking back over everything, kind of, I think I had a lot of unprocessed anger from some of my own life experiences, and I think Waldo's journey and this story were, in some ways, ways of helping me process my own anger.
LIMBONG: Waldo is the main character of the book. She lives with her single mom. She spends most of her time buying clothes she doesn't need online. She's also infatuated with her creative writing teacher, Mr. Korgy, who is 40, married with one kid, and is encouraging to Waldo. In one scene, Waldo sneaks away from prom and finds Mr. Korgy in a classroom and asks if she can hug him. Here's McCurdy reading.
MCCURDY: (Reading) He doesn't respond, which I take as a yes. I step toward him and hug him, but he doesn't move, so I lift his arms and extend them to wrap around me. His sweat stains press against me, bleeding through the armpits of his button down. I run my hands along his back and rest my head on his chest, breathing him in. We stay here, suspended in each other's arms.
LIMBONG: There's a lot to unpack in this chaste scene that gets less chaste a few paragraphs later, but let's focus on two details, one being the sweat stains. Mr. Korgy isn't otherworldly handsome. He's a regular guy with curly belly hairs and body odor, which is what attracts Waldo to him.
MCCURDY: I think she is able to see herself through a more beautiful lens by being with him because she sees how he sees her. And she's, you know, she might not feel beautiful to herself, but to a 40-year-old man who's, you know, past his prime, doesn't take care of himself, looking a bit crusty, to put it nicely, you know, he's going to see her as this goddess, and so she, for a moment, can glimpse herself through his eyes, and that feels nice.
LIMBONG: Detail, too, being that Waldo is the one who goes after him. She's the one who goes to his classroom. She's the one who doesn't wait for an answer when she approaches him.
MCCURDY: As much as I wanted to showcase her agency, her sense of independence, and I desperately felt that she needed to be the aggressor, at the end of the day, he's still 40-years-old. He's still her teacher.
LIMBONG: As a writer, McCurdy is attracted to dry sentences that verge on understated, clean, fussed overwriting, disguising overwhelming emotion and anger. It's an illusion of control. That'd be familiar to any teenager. Andrew Limbong, NPR News.
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