Autumn 2026 – Cristel van Kleij – Half his Age

October 1st, 2013, 17:00, My bedroom 

“Dinner’s ready!” Mom yells from the kitchen. I ignore her call and put my headphones back on. The chemical scent of tropical coconut self-tan lingering on my skin mixes with the burnt plastic of the hair straightener I always forget to turn off. The smell nauseates me. I can’t seem to bring my attention back to beautylover16’s YouTube video, all the tutorials I watched blending together to form one perfect one I will never manage to recreate perfectly. 

From the bottom of my Converse bag, I dig up a pink book I (secretly) bought at the mall yesterday. The cover shows red lips seductively sucking a finger. I haven’t read any books in a while; my Hunger Games collection is quietly collecting dust on the shelf. This one intrigued me, though. I open it, hoping Mom will be too busy feeding my hungry dad to realise I’m missing from the table. My eyes scan the title.

 October 1st, 2026, 17:00, Utrecht University Library 

Half His Age, former child star Jennette McCurdy’s debut novel, follows 17-year-old Waldo as she is groomed by her 40-year-old English teacher, Mr. Korgy. As I sit to write this, the book remains closed on the desk, looking up at me provokingly, as if to say: “Well, final thoughts?” An immiscible mixture of laudatory and critical reviews fills any space I need to make up my own mind about this controversial novel. I frantically scroll through Goodreads, sit through long-form commentary videos, and ultimately land on an interview with Jennette McCurdy herself.  

She speaks vulnerably about being in an age-gap relationship during her late teens, which served as a “jumping-off point” that helped her process rage from her past. Jennette never explicitly mentions the term “grooming,” which is why I refrain from using this word to describe her personal experiences. She does explicitly emphasise that while her previous work, 2022’s I’m Glad My Mom Died, was a memoir, Half His Age is a work of fiction. Having read and loved her memoir, a deeply honest and humorous book, I was excited to read Half His Age. When writing a fictional novel heavily inspired by your own relationships and traumas, I imagine it’s difficult to write a character who feels distinct from yourself. Perhaps that is why I find myself wondering about my own distance from the girl I was at half my age. This novel is not marketed as autofiction; it’s supposed to tell Waldo’s story. 

Still, I wonder how much distance there really can be between a writer and a character built from their own past. I think back to Roxane Gay’s 2014 essay “Not Here to Make Friends,” in which she reflects on the difficulty of creating individual, compelling characters: “Characters are hard to create because we need to develop people who are interesting enough to hold a reader’s attention. We need to ensure that they are some measure of credible. We need to make them distinct from ourselves.” Do I think Waldo is interesting, credible, and distinct from the author? I open the book to reread the pages with fresh eyes. 

October 1st, 2013, 19:00, My bedroom 

My stomach is rumbling, so I attempt to silence it by shoving down some blue M&M’s. Jittery from the sugar high, I twirl a piece of heat-damaged hair around my finger while my eyes dart across the pages. 

I […] do some real damage at Sephora—a Dior foundation in a frosted glass bottle, a mini honey hair oil that I couldn’t decide if I loved or hated the scent of, a Milk Makeup Lip + Cheek that I convinced myself was a steal instead of a marketing ploy […] It’s the line that keeps me even more stuck on the hamster wheel of the pursuit of beauty. Even more dependent on makeup tutorials and tips-and tricks videos and “that perfect cream bronzer.” Because anything could be the thing that makes the difference between me being beautiful or not. 

I swallow, looking at the Douglas checkout tab, where my shopping basket contains the same three name-brand items beautylover16 recommended to me. Quickly, I change back to the tutorial where she is still smiling at me, blush brush in hand. My laptop is overheating on my lap. I ignore the burning sensation and keep reading. 

I scoop a dollop of the sugar scrub onto my legs and scrape it into every pore. There can never be too much scraping, too much sloughing off, of a woman’s body. What is a woman, really, if not silky? If not smooth? If not supple, perky, and poreless? 

My nausea from earlier is back. I wonder if more M&M’s will suppress the discomfort, so I test my theory by downing two handfuls of them. Waldo continues:  

I suck the sour sugar from the last remaining gummy bodies until my tongue is scraped raw. I’ve always derived a strange pleasure from the pain of junk food. 

I close the bag of M&M’s and throw it across the room. And then, the book. 

 October 1st, 2026, 19:00, Utrecht University Library 

On the pages, I see many elements I really enjoy: the almost manic descriptions of obsessive beauty rituals, the masochistic indulgence Waldo finds in self-destructive habits like bingeing junk food and online shopping, and, most of all, the evocative sensory descriptions that make these rituals feel visceral and tangible. These passages bring together elements of capitalist and feminist critique in a unique, non-judgemental way. They make the story compelling and keep my attention, but do they make Waldo feel convincing as a teenage girl? “What is a woman, really, if not silky? If not smooth? If not supple, perky and poreless?” The passages often sound like an adult looking back at their teenage behaviour and retroactively interpreting it, much like McCurdy did in I’m Glad My Mom Died. 

I find these insights powerful, but I wish the novel offered a fuller picture of Waldo as a person, beyond her reflections on her own behaviour and experiences of trauma. When Korgy shows her old French films like The 400 Blows and Cléo de 5 à 7, Waldo is quick to say they are “not really her thing.” We learn that she has a clear talent for writing and distinctly prefers plain prose. When Korgy recommends books to her, she is certain about what she does not like:  

He shows off another, This Side of Paradise. “This one’s got its moments. I actually think it’s better than Gatsby, though Fitzgerald might be a bit flowery for you…” “Sure,” I nod. “Occam’s razor. That’s how I feel about writing. I like writing that’s simple. Plainly stated observations, no fluff. I don’t wanna hear, ‘It was the kind of gray morning with air so frigid that it makes your bones wail like a creaking staircase’. I wanna hear: ‘It was a cold Tuesday. My bones hurt.’ Get to the point, you know?” “Mmm. Then yeah, Fitzgerald’s not for you.” 

This scene establishes that Waldo does have an individual perspective, literary preferences, a sense of herself as a writer. Rereading it reminds me of what McCurdy said in one of the interviews, so I search for the quote again: “I really appreciate and respect writing that’s at certain points distanced and a little detached, and just really plainly stated. I don’t need somebody to tell me how to feel, I want to feel.” This brings me back to Roxane Gay’s point: Is Waldo distinct from the woman that writes her? Particularly when writing about sensitive themes like predatory relationship dynamics, where does the author’s retrospective understanding end and the consciousness of a fictional character begin?  

Waldo does not necessarily tell the reader how to feel, but she does tell the reader how to interpret her behaviour before they get the chance to do so. For example, when Waldo talks about buying more clothes: “They were just smaller, more attainable things to want. Placeholders for the bigger, insatiable, incorrigible want underneath.” Before we can wonder why Waldo indulges, she provides the interpretation for us, leaving little room for the reader to question her motivations. 

Another detail in this passage about shopping returns to the point I made earlier: “(…) in three months I’ll decide I don’t want them anymore, which seems like a thing I should’ve known to begin with.” Waldo literally predicts what she will feel in three months and suggests she should have understood this already. The scene contains its own hindsight, as though a later realisation has been imposed on the present moment. This is where I find the distinction between Waldo and McCurdy most difficult to maintain. Waldo could be a perceptive, self-aware teenage girl without having the retrospective knowledge of an adult woman. Yet, the narration repeatedly seems to give her that perspective. 

October 1st, 2013, 21:00, My bedroom 

I pick the book up off the ground. It opens to a page that goes into detail about the exact thing I thought I was looking for. A graphic sex scene between Waldo and Mr Korgy. Like a car crash, I can’t look away. When it’s finally over, the characters lie in bed together: “[H]e traces my belly button with his finger and my stomach lurches with that terrible feeling of something being taken away. Sometimes I hate the things my body knows.” 

I lie back down on the bed and stare at the One Direction posters on my ceiling. I now feel the mark the overheating old laptop left on my skin. Silence. Then, a ping. A notification pops up on my laptop screen, and I pull it closer to read the message. 

max1995: have dinner yet? 

I place the laptop at the end of the bed. Is my stomach burning, or is it from my laptop? Thirteen minutes go by. Two pings. 

max1995: come on, ill pick you up with the car 

max1995: lets do mcdonalds again 

I get out of bed, open my bedroom door, and walk down the hallway.  

 

October 1st, 2026, 21:00, Utrecht University Library 

Too immersed in my own story, I notice only now that it is already dark outside. I look around and realise I’m the only person left in the library. Exhausted, I close the book. 

I can’t help but think how satisfying it would be to give you a final verdict. But I’m still split in two. On one side, there’s a girl half my age who feels recognized and understood by Waldo. On the other side, there’s 26 year-old me, who feels that a novel engaging with themes this important needed a fully realised protagonist to become the impactful story it could have been. 

It would be even more satisfying to give this teenage version of me Waldo’s kind of ending: hand out the window like a singer in the nineties, curls blowing in the wind, shutting off her phone and escaping from what doesn’t serve her. But the girl I constructed deserves her own story.  

We’ve heard Jennette’s. But now, I want to hear Waldo’s. 

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