A seven-year old Jenette thinks this as she brushes her mother’s hair. Any pause and her mother nudges her, ‘Why’d ya quit brushing?’ Expressing any interest of her own would risk provoking her matriarch to a tantrum. Tears welling in her eyes, Jenette’s mother, Debra, pressures her into getting Nutty Coconut ice cream when she wants Cookies and Cream. But this is mild compared to other moments of mother-daughter bonding. Her mother reminds her with a religious rewatching of her trial at a cancer ward, how Jenette naively and joyfully sang, as a little girl might do, when she should have pined remorselessly for her sick mother. Her teary-eyed brothers, it seemed, got the message. Why can’t Jenette be more like them? Every choice, we learn, consequential as being a child star or miniscule as the shampoo she uses, is micromanaged by a maternal avatar-user with a vicariously lived acting career.
The actress behind iCarly’s tough tomboy Sam Puckett reveals a bitter world of insecurities and abuse, prettified and sugar-coated as she was for TV stardom, in her autobiography I’m Glad My Mom Died. The front cover, a hair-sprayed, lip-glossed, pink-suited, and on-cue smiley version of Jennette, captures the contrast so acutely recorded in the book.
