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73 pages 2 hours read

Jennette McCurdy

I'm Glad My Mom Died

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2022

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Chapters 48-55Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 48 Summary

After her seizure, Jennette’s mother falls into a coma. According to her doctor, these seizures are a common side effect of her brain tumor. It is now the day before Christmas Eve, and Jennette’s mother has been in a coma for a week. Jennette offers to get everyone food at Burger King to help distract herself. Frustratingly, her brothers are too upset to eat. She is envious that sadness translates to lack of hunger for them. She binges, and feels uncomfortable with how full she is. Back at the hospital, for the first time, she tries to throw up her food. After several attempts, she gives up. When she returns to her mother’s hospital room, her brother Dustin tells her that their mother is awake. She races to grab her mother’s hand. Her mother turns to her and weakly admonishes her for eating Burger King.

Chapter 49 Summary

Miranda and Jennette cry together as iCarly finally ends. While Jennette is relieved to leave behind the repetitive and seemingly endless routine of the show, she is nervous about starting her spin-off. Most importantly, she is terrified of losing her close friendship with Miranda. She knows that so many relationships live within the context of their circumstance. Jennette is very familiar with the incremental, slow tragedy of a withering intimacy. She does not want her friendship with Miranda to end because their context, iCarly, is disappearing.

Chapter 50 Summary

Jennette breaks up with Joe, citing her mother’s health as the reason why she can’t get close to anyone right now. Incredulous, Joe argues that getting close to someone is the whole point of being in a relationship. Jennette counters that she does not want to pile her grief on anyone. Joe says that he welcomes that, which is not a response that Jennette is expecting. She struggles to think of another rhetorical line to use. Joe tells Jennette that if she doesn’t love him anymore, she should just say so. Jennette reassures him that she loves him but thinks about how there are so many things about him that she doesn’t like: his unfunny jokes, his drinking, his lack of ambition, and his anger. At the same time, she wonders if he has a similar list of things he does not like about her. He asks her why she is breaking up with him if she loves him. She replies, “I just am” (268).

Chapter 51 Summary

After having a sleepover, Jennette and Miranda drive around the city in Miranda’s Porsche. Despite iCarly ending, Jennette and Miranda have maintained, and even strengthened, their friendship. Jennette gets a call from her mother at the hospital. As she is being wheeled into surgery, she begs Jennette to come to the hospital. Even though it is a minor surgery, she insists that something isn’t right, and she is scared. Jennette’s father takes the phone and tells Jennette that she doesn’t need to come, and everything is okay. A few minutes later, he calls Jennette back and tells her that something went wrong. He says that Jennette’s mother is not doing well, and Jennette needs to get to the hospital right away.

Chapter 52 Summary

The scene is the same as the Prologue. Jennette tells her comatose mother that she is only 89 pounds, certain that this will wake her up. Jennette feels grateful that she has almost stopped eating entirely since the coma began. Her family has been told that her mother has less than 48 hours to live. As they sit together in their mother’s hospital room, Jennette thinks about how agonizing this wait is. Suddenly, Jennette’s mother wakes up and asks for a soda. The moment is so surreal they all laugh. Despite her condition, she continues to live much longer than anticipated, and everyone gets back into their routines. Jennette finishes shooting for her spin-off, Sam & Cat, and then goes to the hospital to be with her mother. A nurse changing Jennette’s mother’s colostomy bag asks her for a picture. Jennette is angry and refuses. Her mother attempts to say, “I love you,” one of the few phrases she now says, as her brain is too riddled with tumors to properly function. Jennette feels heartbroken and guilty that she cannot be stronger for her mother. She gets a text from her friend Colton inviting her to take a road trip to San Francisco. She agrees and leaves the hospital.

Chapter 53 Summary

Colton and Jennette reminisce about their friendship as they drive to San Francisco. When they get there, Colton suggests that they buy alcohol, which Jennette is nervous about. She still has not had a drink before, partly because of Joe’s relationship with alcohol. But she feels safe with Colton, so she agrees. They take shots and hang out all night, and the next morning, Jennette says that it was one of the best nights of her life. They debate taking another shot that morning, but instead wait until the evening so that they have something to look forward to. Jennette wonders why she waited so long to drink because getting drunk feels incredible. When she is drunk, her mother’s voice in her head disappears.

Chapter 54 Summary

In the three weeks since first taking shots with Colton in San Francisco, Jennette has been drunk every night. For the first time, Jennette wakes up with a hangover, and realizes that she is running late for a flight to New York, where she is supposed to host an event for Nickelodeon. A contractor arrives to work on Jennette’s house, which she bought recently and has begun to fall apart. As she frantically packs for New York, her father calls and tells her that she needs to be at the hospital, because the doctors say that her mother will die today.

Chapter 55 Summary

Jennette and her family surround her mother in their Garden Grove home. Jennette’s mother has been on hospice care, staying in a hospital bed in the living room, for three weeks. Jennette gets a text from “Current Guy,” the person she has been casually dating (289). Despite the fact that he is sweet and thoughtful, she does not love him, and doesn’t feel like she even has the emotional capacity to feel that way at this time in her life. She texts him back, telling him that she can’t be in a relationship right now and needs to be alone to deal with her mother’s inevitable death. He naively texts back that her mother isn’t going to die, annoying Jennette further. She feels that the world is divided between people who understand loss and people who do not. She puts the phone down and watches with her brothers as her mother finally stops breathing. Instead of crying, they sit in silence. Jennette texts Current Guy back, telling him that her mom just died.

Chapters 48-55 Analysis

When Jennette’s mother falls into a coma, Jennette attempts to throw up her food for the first time. Pragmatically, she wants to throw up because she is ashamed of and uncomfortable with how much fast food she ate, but it is also a means of gaining control as her mother’s health deteriorates. Thinness is a part of her connection with her mother, and in some ways is synonymous with her mother herself. This is emphasized by her mother’s first words to her when she wakes back up: “The boys said you stopped at Burger King. You don’t need to be eating that stuff. Lotta grams of fat in a Whopper” (263). 

Jennette is in a transitional time in her life, as iCarly comes to an end and her mother dies. Instead of finding comfort in her relationship with Joe, it makes her pull away from him, and finds herself unable to relate to people who do not understand grief and loss. At the same time, she does not know how to understand her own grief and complicated feelings about her mother. After her mother falls into another coma, the narrative returns to the moments occurring in the Prologue, as Jennette attempts to wake her mother by announcing how thin she is. She is in disbelief that being her mother’s goal weight for her is not enough, when this powerful connection between them has survived so much. Unable to bear sitting around with her comatose mother, looking at her frail and failing body, Jennette goes on a trip with her friend Colton. Here, for the first time, she gets drunk, and immediately finds it to be curative. For the first time, the anxiety and pain that she feels go away. To Jennette, those feelings are not just related to her mother, they are her mother: “when I’m drunk, the voice of mom judging me evaporates completely” (281). For three weeks, she gets drunk every single night, and shows up to her mother’s deathbed hungover. The torturously drawn-out ending of her mother’s life is concluded with an anti-climactic sense of numbness.

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