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January 28, 2026 — 4:00pm
FICTION
Half His Age
Jennette McCurdy
4th Estate, $32.99
A decade ago, feminist writer Vivian Gornick wrote that for women, “to be loved sexually is to be loved not for one’s actual self but for one’s ability to arouse desire in the other.”
For many young women, however, the quest to free oneself and to be sexually desirable is inextricably linked, including the narrator of Jennette McCurdy’s novel, Half His Age, about a 17-year-old who embarks on a sexual affair with her married English teacher as a misguided pathway to power.
While performing fellatio during an early sexual encounter, she insists: “I’ll get it far enough back in my throat that he’ll have to love me.” In this crackling debut novel, McCurdy retains all the mordant intensity and wit that made her memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, the global sensation it was.
In pacy short chapters, we follow the restless and insecure Waldo, a self-described “white trash” trailer-park daughter of a single mum as she plummets into an obsessive love for her weatherworn forty-something teacher, Theodore Korgy.
Our doomed lovers play tag amid the dull gnaw of the cold in Anchorage, Alaska. For the teenage Waldo, it’s looking after the spiritual wellbeing of her narcissist mother — a woman who is sustained by the attention of men – while doing shifts at Victoria’s Secret, a job that has given her “a peek into a woman’s psyche” and their loneliness. For Mr Korgy, it’s fulfilling the duties of a husband and father, acquiescing to his spouse’s every want and need.
Current cultural touchstones centre precocious young women diligently entering into sexual affairs with insipid, average married men, for instance Raven Leilani’s Luster and Madeline Grey’s Green Dot. In both novels, our heroines arrive at an understanding of the limited powers of their youth and sexuality. Does Half His Age add anything new to this scrutiny? Yes and no. More interesting though, I wondered once again why as consumers, we are so obsessed with affair stories. Is it like a porn fantasy playing out?
Or could it be a more innocuous yet urgent recognition of heteropessimism (feelings of disappointment, embarrassment or despair at the state of heterosexual relations), an earnest entreaty for young women to find empowerment, joy and freedom outside romantic relationships with men? I’d like to believe so. After all, straight women are the publishing industry’s largest cohort of makers and users. There is a reason why these books sell.
Fundamentally, we all see a bit of ourselves in these protagonists — a certain kind of woman who possesses the laser-sharp self-scrutiny formed by a lifetime of being systematically disenfranchised.
“We’re two sad, bored, tired, lonely people who want each other,” Waldo tells her teacher. To herself, she acknowledges the futility of her enterprise: “I settled for pleasure when I wanted connection.” McCurdy etches the book’s emotional apparatus on Waldo’s struggle to be loved. All the while, Waldo is tirelessly making herself up to be someone she thinks her male lover wants: “a doll, a dream, a marionette with lifeless eyes, and no needs of my own … maybe then he will love me too.”
Ultimately, it’s an exhausting, unreachable endeavour. Yet, we read on. We want to see how the blind are unblinded. And with McCurdy’s signature dry tone, we follow her story with an acute sense of dreadful enthusiasm. At times, Waldo is given a knowingness and foresight that’s clearly derived from the experiences of a much older person. When she goes all Alex Forrest (Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction) on Mr Korgy, she reflects: “It’s pathetic and I don’t even care. I don’t need dignity. I just need him.”
But it’s a forgivable prevarication, and one that might even suggest a depressing truth – that young women are never treated as seriously as they deserve to be.
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