Jennifer Aniston is bringing Jennette McCurdy’s 2022 memoir to the small screen.
The Friends star is set to executive produce and star in Apple TV+‘s 10-episode adaptation of I’m Glad My Mom Died.
“I’m Glad My Mom Died is a heartbreaking and hilarious recounting of Jennette McCurdy’s struggles as a former child actor while dealing with her overbearing, domineering mother,” the press release reads. “The dramedy will centre on the codependent relationship between an 18-year-old actress in a hit kid’s show, and her narcissistic mother who relishes in her identity as ‘a starlet’s mother.”
Jennette is adapting her book alongside Ari Katcher (Ramy, Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show), and the two will serve as co-showrunners on the series.
The iCarly star’s memoir chronicles the relationship she had with her mother Debra and the road to recovery she took after her mother died in 2013.
“I genuinely felt I had no identity without my mum,” she told The Guardian in 2022. “I didn’t know who I was. I felt terrified, incompetent and incapable. Eventually, the process for me was realising that those feelings were her conditioning. That was her voice, not mine, but it took a long time to get to a place where I could identify that I was, and am, glad that she died.”
Despite the intense topics explored in the book, Jennette says the memoir changed her life.
“Not one person has approached me for being an actor from the TV show they watched when they were little,” she said. “For the past year, it has 100 percent been being recognised as the author of this book, and I am beyond grateful for that. I wish I could describe to you how grateful I am. It literally makes my heart pound.”
The now 33-year-old stepped away from acting in 2018 but hasn’t ruled out a return to her former career.
“I do feel like only through writing the book have I gotten to a place where I think there might be a way of exploring acting that doesn’t carry that baggage that I carried with me for so long,” she told E! News in 2022. “Maybe if I write something for myself. I think that’d really be maybe one of the only ways I could kind of try exploring it again.”
In the same interview, she said she’d love to work with Molly Shannon, the actress who wrote her TIME100 Next list entry.
“We knew Jennette McCurdy as a child star and comedian, but with her memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, the world realised she is also an incredible, brilliant writer who worked her ass off to get to the point where she could take her mum off a pedestal and be real about her experiences growing up with narcissistic parental abuse. She had to find her voice to survive. And what a powerful voice it is!” Molly wrote in the entry.
The actress continued, “You can see the work Jennette put into therapy to process all she had to endure to write this book, from disordered eating to her mum’s fits of volatility. I love how fair she is in examining their relationship. She doesn’t mince words. I can’t stop recommending this book.”
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