Jennette McCurdy stopped by the Tonight Show to talk about her novel, Half His Age, with Jimmy Fallon.
The actor’s debut novel, published Tuesday by Ballantine, tells the story of a 17-year-old girl in Alaska who embarks on an affair with her 40-year-old creative writing teacher. A critic for Kirkus called it “a debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.” It’s McCurdy’s second book, following her bestselling 2022 memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died.
Fallon asked McCurdy how it felt to write fiction after writing a memoir.
“I’ve actually written a lot more fiction over the course of my life,” she said. “Growing up, I’d write little short stories. I wrote a novel once where—have you seen Harry Potter? You know the Knight Bus, the three-decker bus? I had a three-decker bus in my thing, I just made it multicolored and called it the Sherbet Bus instead and thought I could get away with it.”
Asked what Half His Age is about, McCurdy said, “I would say Half His Age is an exploration of female rage and power and desire as told through the lens of a very lonely and very ravenous 17-year-old girl. I feel like all 17-year-old girls are lonely and ravenous, but she’s particularly lonely and particularly ravenous.”
Fallon asked McCurdy when she got the idea for her novel.
“I was on a solo trip to Japan when I was 24, and I was on a Shinkansen, a bullet train, and that’s when I first knew that I was going to write this,” she replied. “I had the seed of the protagonist, Waldo, and the seed of the hook of it, but it didn’t come back around until about eight years later, so I’ve been working on it for two years, and now it’s out, and I can’t believe it.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
