Jennette McCurdy shares the stories behind memoir “I’m Glad My Mom Died”

On the outside, I was doing a lot of tap dancing, like smiling and showing up and landing on my mark and I'm going to do what I have to do and be this, you know, carefree. nickelodeon kid my name is samantha puckett i'm from seattle and i love fried chicken but inside it hurt, it was painful, i was angry, i felt unsupported, you pulled back the curtain on child stardom, it's not a pretty picture, not like me I see. No, at just 15 years old Jeanette McCurdy was one of the most recognizable child stars on television playing Sam Puckett on the hit Nickelodeon show Icarly, Where Did My Straw Go? here to her millions of fans, she was known as the fun best friend, but she says that behind that bubbly on-screen character nothing about her real life was funny to you what were the dangers of childhood fame are you playing an adult game you're in an adult world and you don't recognize that you're incapable of being at that level, but you're confused and you think you are, and I think that really leads to stunted personal development.

Her personal struggles eventually led her to abandon acting altogether. You say quite frankly that this was never your dream, stardom was never your dream, whose dream was it my mom? I think she wanted me to have a better life than her, but I also think her approach was very unhealthy and was influenced by her own personal lack of work and lived vicariously through me. Jeanette had her first audition at age six, encouraged by her deceased. Mom Deborah Her mother-daughter bond is deeply messy and chaotic She says her family had financial problems over time like so many other child stars Her acting paid the bills It felt like a lot of pressure And then I think my mom saw my career as a exit from that life from that way of living from that constant routine how chaotic that childhood home was he describes it with a line that stuck in my mind that the air in the house felt like a held breath it was very complicated my mother also had cancer when I was two years old, it was the first time she was diagnosed, so not only was it chaotic because of the abuse that was happening and my mom's unstable violent and erratic behavior, but also because we were all living in fear that her cancer would come back. , that volatile relationship is at the center of Jeannette's dark and deeply personal

memoir

I'm

glad

my mother

died

, which made you choose that, I think I earned that title by writing the book, but I wanted it to be something that captured people's attention and make them take the book and hopefully at the end you will know why I chose that title when I was 11 years old.

She says her mother taught her the dangerous habit of calorie restriction that would turn into years of disordered eating in many ways. I tried to keep you like a child, yes, I think my mom wanted to keep me as controllable as possible. I think she really wanted to have her influence on me and me growing up was a threat to that. The key to that was calorie restriction. I think my Mom encouraged and conditioned my anorexia because she thought it would somehow help my career and also because it fulfilled her goal of keeping me young and, under her influence, the book reveals dark episodes from her childhood that for years Jeanette says she blocked out.

She describes how her mother gave her showers and touched her in invasive ways until she was a teenager. She referred to them as medical examinations on her private parts. Yes, this was the hardest part of the book for me, it was a really emotional experience. I laughed while she was writing it and then I cried a lot after writing that vignette where you talk about basically having out-of-body associations, out-of-body experiences when this happens to you, yeah, what do you think was going on? I tried to understand it and it didn't get me anywhere productive. I was just spinning my wheels trying to understand my mother's motives.

This continued until you were 17 years old. Yes, and she describes in the book that she felt violated. Yes, I felt absolutely violated. and ultimately accepted that I believe it was the most integral piece to my own healing and recovery at the peak of her stardom. He landed a spin-off series Sam and Cat starring alongside future pop star Ariana Grande. Write about the tensions on set. Look what I said, say it again I said I'm very smart, you literally wrote, I often made the mistake of comparing my career to Ariana's, yes, and being jealous of everything, jealous of her childhood, jealous of a musical career that you didn't even want.

I'm sure he was jealous specifically because she played charades with Tom Hanks, that's what Charades with Tom Hanks got me, how dare you? I know, but I was very young at the time and I think it's very hard not to compare yourself to someone that age when we're in an environment around them all the time, so I made that mistake repeatedly and I'm

glad

I'm now in a place where he wouldn't trade positions with anyone while the show was airing. Her mother

died

. of cancer jeannette says her life was out of control anorexia turning into bulimia and alcohol abuse i was never aiming for bulimia i was trying to have anorexia but i couldn't go on like this without my mom so that would lead me to I was starving for so long and then I would binge and then purge because I hated the feeling of fullness, I hated it.

It would take Jeanette years to seek the right help and begin therapy to begin to deal with her trauma that she initially could not accept. the idea that my mother abused me because my whole way of life, my way of going through the world, was that I was operating through this lens that my mother wants the best for me, even after she died. I am nothing without my mother. I can't do anything without my mom I'm incapable I'm incompetent What would mom want? What would mom think? What does mom need? That accepting that she was abusive would have meant rethinking my entire life and that felt impossible.

I couldn't go. close to that for a long time jeannette says building a new life without her mom started with a surprising decision to leave acting behind why stopping acting was important for my recovery at the time it represented my mom leaving indirectly through me It represented something that my Mom wanted that I didn't want, so it was important for me to step away in a very definitive way and really focus completely on healing myself and reflecting on Jeanette's criticisms of her career towards the Hollywood machine and the world she was exposed to in At Such A Young Age, in her book she writes that after Sam and Cat was cancelled, Nickelodeon offered her a thank you gift of 300,000 if she agreed to never speak publicly about her experience on the network, specifically with a man she refers to as the creator who on one occasion, she says, encouraged her to drink when she was still underage and gave her a shoulder massage in response.

Nickelodeon told ABC News that we do not have a reportable response other than a no comment at this time. I just said no it's not happening, that sounds like hush money. for me, not doing it, not taking it and then I remember leaning on it, I think I talk about this in the book, but I lean on my bed and I'm like, oh, gee, I could have sent my nieces to college, that was a good thing. . money, but ultimately I'm proud of my decision, um, wherever it came from, even if it was informed by self-righteousness, I think I did something that was really hard to do, oh my gosh, it makes me emotional, I'm proud . of myself why proud of yourself i believe i have chosen a path of integrity and it hasn't always been easy now 30 jeanette says she recovered from years of eating disorders and found a sense of balance for the first time in her life what is? your body image now and what your relationship is with food and how you live your day.

I'm glad you asked this because when people talk about eating disorder recovery, they talk about it being an ongoing process and something you have to deal with. every day for the rest of your life and it's always a battle and I think that kind of language doesn't help motivate me. I'm in a place now where I don't obsess at all about food, which I haven't gotten involved with. any type of eating disorder for years. I'm very proud of that. Jeanette says healing also comes from horseback riding. She is working on a novel and a collection of essays and, although she sees herself as a writer, she hasn't completely ruled out a return to acting - I just wish I could have shown my 20-year-old self by now I would have known what I was aspiring to I would have had something to look forward to Waiting for something to cheer me up didn't have that.

What would you have said to him? Your 20 year old self, look at me now, baby, you're going to be okay, kid. I probably would have said Hello everyone, George Stephanopoulos. Thank you for visiting ABC News YouTube channel if you want to see more videos, highlights and watch. Live event coverage, click right here to subscribe to our channel and don't forget to download the ABC News app to receive breaking news alerts. Thanks for watching.