Jennette McCurdy is so not a child actor anymore. She's an author with a capital A.

NEW YORK – When you’re talking to Jennette McCurdy, it’s easy to forget her career started as a Nickelodeon actor, not during a highbrow MFA creative writing program.

McCurdy may have grown up in the spotlight on shows like "iCarly" and "Sam & Cat," but she has the soul of a writer. She’s more comfortable alone at her desk than she is getting glitzed up for TV interviews like those she’s done for her debut novel, “Half His Age.” Writers are recluse creatures, I agree. We bond over how strange it is to talk in front of a four-camera setup. We decide we’ll look at each other and ignore the publicists, stylists and camera crew watching beyond the lights.

McCurdy is not content to be the sole participant in an interview conversation. When we talk about her protagonist self-isolating in her relentless pursuit of a relationship, she wants to know if that's ever happened to me. When she explains that she put down another writing project to work on “Half His Age” because the story erupted out of her – she calls it “a vomit draft” – she wants to know the last thing that I wrote that made me feel like that. 

Meet Jennette McCurdy, the author

McCurdy’s press tour is inherently different from that of a writer who got their start writing books. Her 2022 memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” was unflinching in its portrayal of abuse, eating disorders and the dark sides of childhood stardom. Readers are as hungry to know about her personal life as they are about her new work.

I thought of this while I listened to a recent "Call Her Daddy" podcast episode featuring McCurdy. Early in the conversation, host Alex Cooper paused their discussion on the book's power dynamics and asked if McCurdy would go “back to childhood" first.

“Haven’t spent enough time in childhood in therapy, so might as well do more,” McCurdy said to Cooper. 

At this stage in her career, McCurdy has made a conscious, deliberate shift to be known not as a former child actor but as an author with a capital A. I ask her to explain that to me. What were her intentions in defining this new era of her career?

“Can I just say I really appreciate this question, really, on a heart level?” McCurdy says from a couch in USA TODAY's New York studio. “Because it was intentional, but it also wasn’t me just going like, ‘Hmm, you know what? I want to be a writer, I’m going to be a writer.’ It’s something I’ve done my whole life. It’s something that, as a child, has always been the way that I’ve processed the world.

“Acting was my mom’s dream. She literally wanted to be a famous actress and her parents wouldn’t let her. So then she lived sort of vicariously through me, but writing was always the thing that I wanted to do.”

Since her memoir published, she's noticed a change in her interactions with fans − "a 180," she says. She appreciates conversations with "kindred spirit" readers that are rooted in respect and dialogue. She grew up with fans shouting at her and grabbing her with "an uncomfortable amount of squeeze," making their kids take pictures with her.

"I feel more of a sense of belonging in the literary world than I ever, ever did in Hollywood," McCurdy says. "[I've been] finding my people and feeling like I've got lifelong friends and they're authors. These are my people. These are my friends."

A ‘seed’ of truth in McCurdy’s inspiration for ‘Half His Age’

"Uncomfortable," however, is a word McCurdy embraces when it comes to the book itself. "Half His Age" follows Waldo, a high schooler who initiates an obsessive, entangled sexual relationship with her creative writing teacher.

Waldo is very different from McCurdy. She’s bolder and less naive than McCurdy was at 17, she says. McCurdy tells me she felt she missed out on the teenage years she describes in “Half His Age.” But there’s a grain of truth in the age gap relationship plot. McCurdy herself was in a “creepy” relationship with an older man when she was 18. All writers put a degree of themselves into their work, even if it’s fiction. 

“How could you not? I don't know how it could be done without having some piece of yourself, some seed of it,” she says.

Writing Waldo was healing for her, McCurdy says. 

“[Writing] is a way to process unprocessed feelings and that really was the thing that drove the book out of me,” McCurdy says.

In a way, “Half His Age” does exist in the afterglow of her memoir. If you felt uneasy laughing at McCurdy’s humor between harrowing childhood stories in “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” just wait until you read the sex scenes between a 17-year-old and her fortysomething, married creative writing teacher. 

That’s purposeful, McCurdy tells me. 

“I think the value of discomfort is another conversation that I hope surfaces,” McCurdy says. “It can be a sexy read, but at times it can really be, to your point, an uncomfortable one. I think being uncomfortable is so useful and so valuable, and it's an indication that there is a conversation to be had. I can't really think of many times when I'm comfortable and there's a juicy conversation and there's something to dissect.”

One firm foot in publishing, one toe back in Hollywood

A week after she finished the manuscript for “Half His Age,” McCurdy wrote it into a screenplay. It’s now been confirmed for adaptation, and she’s attached to direct it. 

Stepping into the writer’s room instead of an actor’s trailer is a more appealing Hollywood access point now. McCurdy is eager to tackle adaptation, a task she thinks best suited for authors themselves. 

“How often do you hear ‘Oh, well, the movie was better than the book’?” McCurdy says. “There's a reason for that. It's because the author has that story in them and they've articulated it already once, beautifully. Why wouldn't we assume that they could do it again in a different format? It only makes sense. They have that voice, they have that vision. I think so often the thing is handed off to another pair of hands and then the voice gets muddled, the vision gets lost.”

“I’m Glad My Mom Died” will soon be a 10-episode Apple TV+ dramedy starring Jennifer Aniston as the titular mother. McCurdy will act as writer, director and showrunner on the series. 

In both projects, she’ll inevitably work with child actors. They may feel the same pressures she faced as a young person in Hollywood. Does she see herself as a mentor or have a concept of what working with young actors in Hollywood will be like?

“I honestly never considered that,” McCurdy says. “I see Hollywood as kind of the background piece. I'm writing my books and that's really my primary focus and then Hollywood can be its noisy circus that I kind of dip my toe in here and there, but books really are my focus and where I feel the most comfortable and where the world makes the most sense. My experience at the publishing world is that it's not insane, which is great.”

Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY’s Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you’re reading at [email protected].