What iCarly’s Jerry Trainor thinks of Jennette McCurdy’s book

After her mother’s death, Jennette wrote that she was glad she was too upset to eat. “At least I feel slim, precious and good in my body,” she wrote, “my smallness.” But when she went out to dinner with friends soon after, she ate everything she ordered and downed a bottle of sake. Realizing later that she could throw it all up, she remembers feeling “victorious”, thinking it was “the start of something good”.

Drinking a lot to help his bulimia has become a habit. By filming on sam and cat wound up in 2014, she just started assuming she would have a bulimia-induced heart attack. “It’s hard to admit it,” she wrote, “but part of me actually wishes I did. Then I wouldn’t need to be here anymore.”

She found that she was binge eating and purging five to 10 times a day and taking eight or nine doses of alcohol each night. Identifying red carpet anxiety as one of her triggers, her eating disorder therapist began accompanying Jennette to events that, for a time, followed a pattern: gorging on food backstage and cry in the car on the way home.

Eventually, she fired that therapist via text, still uncomfortable delving into her childhood trauma. The bulimia continued and Jennette’s teeth began to rot. Spitting out a molar in the bathroom on a flight to Sydney, Australia, to do some press for Netflix, followed by the Uber driver playing Ariana’s ‘Focus on Me’ in the car at his arrival, was a wake-up call. Her next therapist assured her that relapses were normal en route to long-term recovery.