Jennette McCurdy Gets Real About Egg-Freezing on 'Call Her Daddy'

I’m Glad My Mom Died author and former Nickelodeon child actress Jennette McCurdy, 33, doesn’t want to be a mom.

But that’s for now, as she told Alex Cooper on Wednesday’s episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast.   

McCurdy, whose debut memoir about her toxic mother-daughter relationship was a massive best-seller, sat down with Cooper to discuss her forthcoming book—Half His Age, a novel about a high school senior’s relationship with her creative writing teacher. Underneath, it’s about “desire and loneliness,” she said.

“I don’t know how to not write from a deeply personal place,” McCurdy told Cooper, reflecting on her first relationship, at 18, with a man in his 30s. While penning the novel, she shared, “I didn’t even realize how angry I still was.”

The author, raised Mormon as one of four kids, was pushed into acting at the age of 6 by her mother, who was “living vicariously through me,” she said, and in temporary remission from breast cancer. She used her illness, along with other tactics, to guilt, pressure, and control McCurdy, who was the family breadwinner by the age of 13. Her mom’s threat of relapse—something she “weaponized”— hung over the family for years, as she constantly told her kids that it “could come back any minute.”

It eventually did. McCurdy was 21 when her mom died.

And while she doesn’t “really feel angry at her anymore,” she told Cooper, and has done a lot of therapeutic work to get where she is, her upbringing has caused lasting scars—one of which has to do with her idea of motherhood.

“I don’t want kids,” she said.

But, she added, “I know I don’t want kids at this point in my life. I’m also open to wanting kids at some point.” That’s why, this past September, McCurdy, who has been in a relationship for nine years, went through the process of freezing her eggs.

“Because I don’t know if I’m going to change my mind,” she said. “We’ve discussed it and neither of us really want kids, but we are also open to changing our minds and being in that process together.”

She added, “I didn’t want to change my mind 10 years from now and it’d be too late.”

The writer said she had first looked into the egg-freezing process two years ago, meeting with a Beverly Hills doctor who scared her off by drawing pictures of her anatomy to illustrate how “the best time to do this was two years ago.” She thought, “This seems awful. I don’t want to do this.”

When she eventually saw a different doctor who felt “more comforting,” she decided to go for it.

“I thought it was going to be terrible. I was warned that it can be really, really emotional, having these big mood swings. And for me it was actually not that. It was really straightforward and simple,” she said, adding that she was lucky to have a nurse come to her house nightly to assist with the process.  

“I think it would have been a lot more stressful if I’d had to, like, formulate the things myself and put the powder in with the liquid and inject it,” she said, referring to the hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) used to trigger ovulation. “That seems like a nightmare. But having somebody come and administer everything was really helpful, and the process was very simple and seemed effective.”

Whether McCurdy will wind up a parent remains to be seen. But this time in her life, she told Cooper, is “definitely the most grateful I’ve ever been.”