With its instantly iconic title and cover, it’s no surprise that I’m Glad My Mom Died is a hit. It is a little surprising, though, how big of a hit it is. Former Nickelodeon star Jennette McCurdy’s memoir of a childhood dominated by her abusive mother sold 200,000 copies in its first week of release in August and has spent every week but one since then at the top of the NYT Bestseller Lis🌳t.
It’s less surprising if you read the book, which is both existentially sad and darkly funny, often on the same page. Despite chronicling McCurdy’s histo🍌ry with bulimia and parental abuse, it’s also a page turner. After reading the first 50 pages over about a week, I tore through the rest of the book in a day as soon as I had a chance.
Shortly after reading I’m Glad My Mom Died, I got around to watching Petite Maman on Hulu. Celine Sciamma’s follow-up to Portrait of a Lady on Fire is about an eight-year-old girl named Nelly and her parents going back to her mother’s childhood home to clear it out after the death of Nelly’s maternal grandmother. After spending the night, Nelly wakes up to find that her mother left, though Nelly’s dad doesn’t seem too worried. In the meantime, the pair stay to finish clearing up the house and Nel🌠ly explores the nearby woods. There she meets a young girl who looks quite a bit like her. When they visit the girl’s house, it’s identical (though decorated slightly differently) to Nelly’s grandmother’s house. She realizes that, through some strange magic, she has met her mother as a child and the two develop a close friendship.
On the surface, I’m Glad My Mom Die༺d and Petite Maman are quite different. I🍸n her memoir, McCurdy works to disentangle herself from her mother; to find the contours of her own identity when they are no longer defined by her mother’s likes and dislikes. Petite Maman, meanwhile, is about beginning to reckon with your parents as people with their own past, wants, desires, and interior lives. One is painful and hard to read and grounded in fact. The other is a heartbreakingly gentle fable.
But, at a deeper level, both works are concerned with mothers as complicated and somewhat unknowable figures. Though McCurdy and Sciamma both paint vivid portraits of motherhood, each work’s maternal figures make decisions that impact their children but which their children fundamentally cannot understand. Both works are interested in plumbing the depths of the mystery inherent to the parent-child relationship; though, as children, we often spend more time with our parents than anyone else — and know the things they love, the things they hate, the things that make them happy, and the things that make them mad — t🐟here are decades of their personal history that we cannot know. Even if our parents tell us plenty of stories about their lives before us, we still can’t know what it was truly like for them to be young. And though we can’t know, both works show that these unseen successes, failures, and pains shape how they interact with us.
Outside of these two works, movies as varied as Everything Everywhere All At Once, Pearl, The Woman King, The Northman, and The Lost Daughter have presented viewers with mothers who can’t 🦹be everything their children want them to be. Some of these moth🍎ers are much worse than others, but the failures of mothers is a common thread running through a lot of recent art.
Though it could seem anti-feminist, at first, to portray women at their worst, increasingly complex and morally gray portrayals of mothers are good for us all. During the I’m Glad My Mom Died press tour McCurdy has frequently said that she takes issue with the cultural assumption that moms should be lionized. Not all moms belong on a pedestal. And as works like I’m Glad My Mom Died and Petite Maman show, when we bring parents down from that p🐼edestal, we can begin to reckon with them as human beings.