I'm Glad My Mom Died

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2022

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Themes

The Desire for Control

Eating disorders are characterized by the compulsion to control calorie intake and body weight, but these behaviors are often driven by the unconscious desire to control many complex aspects of one’s internal and external existence. When Jennette first is introduced to calorie restriction by her mother, she sees it as a tool for avoiding the physical development that comes with puberty, development that she fears will alienate her from her mother. While Jennette says that she does not want to grow breasts or have her body mature in a way that could stunt her career, it also appears to be an aversion to what puberty signifies: growing up and its associated independence. Throughout the memoir, Jennette traces how her disordered eating reflects her desire to feel stable and in control of her own body and career.

The monitoring of Jennette’s body is also a means of control used by Jennette’s mother. From the time that Jennette asks how she can stop physically developing, her mother seems relieved and even proud that she is seeking unhealthy, false solutions to natural maturation. While the two of them grow closer through their mutual obsession with caloric intake, Jennette’s mother expands her control over her daughter: “Calorie restriction has brought me and Mom closer than we already were, which is really saying something because we were already so close. Calorie restriction is wonderful!” (146). The sarcastic tone of this statement foreshadows Jennette’s realization that her relationship with her body—and with her mother—is unhealthy.

Jennette begins to associate her body and what she eats with her mother and her mother’s expectations explicitly. As she gets older and her disordered eating habits progress, it becomes increasingly clear that she views her relationship with food as something she can control in a life that feels wholly out of her control: “I have been in control of my diet, my body, myself” (323). Either due to her mother’s influence or the unpredictability of the world, her disordered rituals feel like respite from the chaos of emotion: “Bulimia helps me to rid myself of these emotions even if it is a temporary, unsustainable fix” (377).

Paradoxically, her rituals of binge eating and purging that help her feel control over her emotions and her body grow into a force that she feels unable to overcome. That lack of control creates a cycle; sometimes Jennette feels as though she cannot live with these issues any longer and must seek help, and other times she grows resigned to what feels like the insurmountable power of her illness. Over the many years that Jennette lives with an eating disorder, her food habits paradoxically represent both her sense of control and a lack thereof.

Acting and Performativity

Acting, essentially, is the art of skillfully and believably pretending to be someone one isn’t. For Jennette, this definition applies not only to the career that was forced upon her, but also to her way of navigating childhood and her relationship with her mother.

The lines between reality and acting are blurred throughout Jennette’s life. Though she does not begin acting until she is six, she establishes that she is an expert in performing emotion well beforehand. She is required to understand how she is supposed to act and what she is supposed to say in order to please her mother and is hyper-aware of that fact. She predicts and strategizes over the potential events and fallout of a chaotic Sunday morning like a scene in a television show and acts accordingly. She uses a tone and behaves in a way that doesn’t feel necessarily like her, but like the character that her mother wants her to be. When her mother and father erupt into a dysfunctional and disturbing argument, Jennette tries out different words and behaviors in an attempt to end the fighting. When Jennette describes her decision to act in accordance with her mother’s desires, it isn’t a conscious sacrifice but rather a natural desire to fulfill her obligation and have what she wants most, her mother’s happiness.

When acting, Jennette finds success when she is able to accurately depict the emotionally charged and violent fits that her mother falls into at home. She gains notoriety as a child actor that can cry on command, a skill she gained from her mother telling her to imagine disturbingly tragic events befalling her and her loved ones. In many ways, Jennette feels that she has a role as daughter to her mother and cannot deviate. She often acknowledges that she thinks one way but says another because she understands what her mother wants to hear. When she tries to individuate, she is met with emotional manipulation and guilt, and usually self-corrects.

While her mother decries her own lost potential and condemns her parents for not letting her act, she controls those around her with performance. Her canned monologues about being a cancer survivor are a constant in Jennette’s life and are pulled out as a means of manipulation. The VHS tape of family crying over her illness is paraded out each week, a strange ritual that casts her children as characters in performance of suffering and even deification.

Religion

Jennette is raised Mormon, and as a child, she feels strongly attached to the ritual and significance of faith. She knows that her family only began attending church with regularity when her mother was diagnosed with cancer. When she asked her mother if going to church was about getting something from God, she was met with nervous laughter and redirection. From a very young age, Jennette was questioning whether the relationship between God and worshiper was about faith or merely transactional.

Jennette describes a common concept in Mormonism of the “little voice,” the Holy Spirit that will supposedly speak to one after they reach a certain age. When Jennette eventually does hear such a voice, it is actually the emergence of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. She is relieved to have experienced such a rite of passage in the Mormon church and feels confident that the voice will guide her. Ultimately, the voice of the Holy Spirit is a manifestation of her intense anxiety and subsequent compulsions. As the Holy Spirit instructs her on what actions she must perform in order to have the intended result, her religious experiences echo the transactional nature of her mother’s relationship with the church.

As Jennette’s commitment to her acting career grows, she attends church less—to her chagrin. She has a deep fear of being an “inactive” Mormon and earning God’s disapproval. Her mother, who was so devout in her time of illness, grows dismissive of church, leading Jennette to question if there is any point to religion if you are happy and successful: “Who needs God when you’ve got clear mammograms and a series regular role on Nickelodeon?” (199). By the time Jennette reaches adulthood, she is largely alienated from her earlier interest in faith and Mormonism. Though she keeps up some lingering adherence to the tenets of her faith, like abstaining from sex with her boyfriend Joe, it has less to do with a continued faith and more to do with her negative associations with adulthood and sexuality.

When her boyfriend, Steven, expresses a religious awakening, Jennette is confused and unhappy. In contrast to her early associations of religion with comfort and escape, Steven’s sudden change is a threat to what she sees as the only positive aspect of her life. When his new faith descends into a delusion that he is Jesus Christ, there is a striking parallel between his imagined identity and Jennette’s childhood “little voice.” No longer in denial about the nature of her compulsions, Steven’s turn to religion forces Jennette to acknowledge how much of her life feels wildly out of control, in contrast to her early relationship with religion.