6 out of 5 stars
 
TL;DR:  The people who found this book poorly written must be very spoiled, I don't know.  They’re people who want things to have tidy endings or be perfectly linear in a way that trauma cannot be.  I found it to be masterfully crafted, tightly paced, a testament to “Show, not tell.”  I can’t recommend this book highly enough for anyone surviving a narcissistic parent, especially a borderline mother.  The honesty and insight in this book are unparalleled.  McCurdy’s dry-as-dust humor makes it easy to stay with her on this nightmare journey of abuse that staggers the imagination even as a reader.  It’s truly mind-warping to consider the layer upon layer of exploitation this author suffered, which makes her victory such a massive triumph for all of us who get it.  I would recommend a book called Understanding the Borderline Mother by Christine Ann Lawson to anyone who saw their own mother in Deb McCurdy, a classic waif/hermit.  The dynamics of a borderline family, right down to the passive-aggressive, absentee father, are all laid bare.  As I research the other child actors involved, and where things stand in the aftermath of this book’s publication, I see that Jennette’s voice is a cannon among squirtguns in more ways than one.  Go, girl.
 
***
 
As usual I'm the last one to read a mega-hyped book.  I’m from the 1960s.  So I didn’t know who Jennette McCurdy was.  But as soon as I saw the cover I knew I would read this book and that I would get this woman.  I was not prepared for how well-crafted it was, or for the stunning synchronicity between her life, her abuse, and my own.
 
So my review will be spoiler-tastic, since the book has been out for quite a while now and she blew my entire mind as a survivor.  Again I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
 
While reading this I was amazed at how well-edited it was.  Because one of the points McCurdy  makes in the book is that her education was one of the things that was stolen by her abusers.  All of that was secondary to “the show must go on.”  That’s obvious to me, because I had a similar caseload while my brain was developing.  Not only was nobody really giving me space to focus on school work, they were putting me through hellish paces, all of them.  So people like Jennette McCurdy and me, CPTSD survivors, when we can read and write good, I’m proud of us.
 
As an author myself, I was dazzled by the amazing job she did at showing and not telling.  While the pacing is super tight, and she moves from one scene right to the next with minimal exposition, everything that you need to understand the big picture is there.  She leaves plenty of blank space for you to fill in for yourself.  And I guess that’s what the less-traumatized people are annoyed by, why they’re saying it’s badly written. 
 
If you don’t have the lived experience of trauma, and you’re not able to fill in the negative space that she’s left, then you’ll find it disjointed.  If you need to have flowery language with everything spelled out, then her dry humor and minimal, hyperalert style won’t work for you. 
 
Because the narrative mimics what it’s like to live with the sort of OCD/ADHD one develops when your every thought revolves around placating and emotionally de-escalating your authority figures.  And that mindset makes you a perfect little good sport to get along great in Hollywood, as McCurdy explains perfectly in the book.
 
So people who’ve lived nice, privileged, comfortable little lives, yeah, probably don’t appreciate how it feels to live with CPTSD and be hyperalert, hypervigilant, and have this aroused nervous system that is reflected in McCurdy’s writing style.  It’s a cultural thing that child abuse survivors know instinctively, that we have to smile when it hurts.  We don’t get to spell everything all the way out.  We don’t get tidy endings.  We get abused by lunatics because they’re imbalanced.
 
McCurdy has an extremely light touch when discussing her abusers, in particularly The Creator, aka Dan Schneider.  It’s very clear that she doesn’t want to get sued into oblivion, and that there’s much more she could say.  I have not watched or researched anything about Nickelodeon until after reading this book. 
 
All of that, the petri dish of exploitation that is child acting, is beautifully laid bare in this book.  Jennette literally gets trafficked directly to a creeper with a foot fetish so that her family can get a new fridge.  The more you know about the atmosphere on iCarly – beyond the minimal discussion in this book – the more plain the child trafficking becomes.  Her mother had no sexual boundaries at all. Her dad works two jobs, one of them at Blockbuster Video, and Jennette becomes the primary breadwinner before puberty.  Nothing was okay about any of that, though it was all legal.
 
But the most striking thing of all for me personally was the plot twist I never saw coming, which paralleled a recent revelation in my own life:  that McCurdy’s father wasn’t her mother’s husband.  Nor were two of her brothers’. 
 
I only discovered that none of us were fathered by our dad in my late 50s, when I took a DNA test to try and connect with family back in Italy.  Come to find out we have no idea who my siblings’ fathers are, and none of them are her husband who died 30 years ago.
 
McCurdy’s father mostly gets a free pass in this book because the other villains are so obvious.  But based on my own recent experience, while reading this book, her desperate attempts to connect with him, her constant swings and misses, tore me apart.  Because there she was, living in pure confusion about why she could never get his attention, why she just couldn’t figure that guy out.  She just had to leave a blank there, like I did with my dad.
 
But then she also had to try and run interference when she knew things were horribly wrong in the marriage.  It was her job to keep mom de-escalated when she’d be accusing dad of the affair he definitely wasn’t having because he worked two minimum-wage jobs and didn’t have time.  But she also wasn’t sleeping with him, because she’d hoarded so much crap there was only enough space for one person to fit in the bed.
 
I’m not sure that even now Jennette understands that neither one of her parents was ever anything but an abuser, that there was nothing to love or be grateful about.  They both used her as animated toilet paper, basically, to soothe and satisfy their every little whim, all their days.  I guess her father is still alive, and shame on him.  She should be glad when he dies, too.  He never cared about her, because she wasn’t his blood.  Screw him.
 
Because really, he was an adult.  When he discovered his wife’s affair, it was his job to either deal with her and her mental illness, take ownership of the marriage, or leave it.  A guy Jennette just met takes that much responsibility for her, and she for him.  And they’re not even married.  Her dad could’ve done it. 
 
You don’t get to stay in the marriage and be a passive-aggressive asshole to the little girl, be her father in name only, as my dad did to me.  It’s confusing and destabilizing as all hell for the child.  And it leaves her wide open to The Creator, who insisted that people call him “daddy” on set.  Both parents set her up and drop-kicked her, while living off of her money.  Pure shame.
 
Basically when you have a borderline mother – as Jennette most certainly described – she insists on controlling everyone in the household.  The entire home revolves around whatever she wants, all the time.  That’s why it becomes a hoarder place with the hermit subtype.  Because mom needs you to unwrap presents a certain way so she can save that stuff.  Everybody has to do everything the way mom needs it done, even if it means they can’t be comfortable at all.
 
A borderline mother sees her children as literal outgrowths of herself, chattel property that exist to fulfill her wishes.  She sees nothing wrong with that.  She lives in a sort of constant emotional collapse, which requires the constant input of other people to sustain a solid front.  Then she can put on  whatever image she wants to project, to the people she deems important.
 
But there are always two sides, good-split and bad-split people.  Whenever mommy feels bad, somebody else needs to make it better.  And there’s hell to pay if they don’t.  Deb’s quickness to usurp her daughter’s life in every way, shape, and form is rampant throughout this entire book.  And I saw it with both of my parents.  I’m surprised her father manned up at all.  Because he was every bit as bad.  I’m not sure she’s seen it yet.  But I’m sure he was. Where there’s an overt, there’s a covert one playing their victim and living on their scraps.
 
My father was in a fake marriage that I don’t believe was ever consummated.  He did that because he was from an ethnic community that would not accept his homosexuality.  And he felt very passive-aggressive about the whole thing, and my mother’s humiliating him with his best friend in fathering me.  
 
So he treated me very much the way Jennette’s father treats her in this book.  And I never knew why, either.  I didn’t find out any of this until I was in my late 50s, both my dads are dead.  Jennette finds out while she’s quite young, God bless.
 
So there were just a million and one thoughts and feelings.  I could say so much about this book as a survivor and also as a writer.  I really give it every star.
 
Jennette obviously had a lot of help with the editing.  Because this book is so easy to read for how dreadful the events are.  The entire story is about how she never got a moment to herself, to process anything about her own childhood.  Every second of her life was constantly calibrated to mommy mommy mommy.  People are freaking out about the title like she’s some dirty animal for writing that.  And the title is the litmus test.  It’s all you need to know.  Because Jennette wasn’t allowed to catch her first breath until mommy died.  Some of us understand immediately.
 
I was relieved when she came right out and got it, how bad mommy really was, by the end of the book.  Because the thing with this kind of trauma, CPTSD, is that they keep you so busy chasing your tail that you don’t have time to notice how traumatized you are.  You can only live by, for, and through them.
 
So she had to have a developmental editor helping her make this story flow as smoothly and beautifully as it did, MWAH.  Trauma doesn’t pour straight onto the page so neat and clean, no.  Especially not when you’re home-schooled by a madwoman at a pedo foot-fetish ranch (allegedly) between coochie inspections.  This is a super easy read for how tough the material is.  Because she uses dry humor, wit, insight, and honesty.
 
But yeah, back to her dad.  In paramedic school they taught us about “distracting injuries.”  That’s when somebody doesn’t notice the bits of glass embedded in their forehead because one of their leg bones is jutted out at an angle.  I hope she’s cut contact with her dad.
 
And I would hate to read Justin’s memoir, God help him.  Reading this book helped me gain some perspective on the deal my mother offered to my sister, what a wretched form of abuse it was to be her golden child.  Every family’s dynamics are different.  It’s obvious how and why Jennette’s mother latched onto her versus the boys. 
 
I’m from a different ethnic community than the other kids and stick out like a thumb.  My father is the affair that broke up the marriage.  So I’m the one everybody hated.  That was Justin in the McCurdy family.  Justin was made to shower with his sister while she got her boobs and snooch “examined for cancer” by their mom.  Her mom was doing home pap smears in the shower with 15-year-old Justin made to be there.
 
When Jennette wants to keep mommy alive the way one might clap for Tinkerbelle, she tells her how thin she is.  Because that’s what mommy wants to see in her magical mirror, the one she pushed out and has been polishing polishing polishing every day for so long.
 
And then there’s Dustin, the one who mommy’s so ashamed of.  But there he is.  And every time mommy feels ashamed, or angry, or something’s out of her control, it’s his fault.  That’s why she needs him.  And if he tries to leave, or get better, or have things not always be his fault, there will be hell to pay.  I’ve realized that my mom’s siblings all really resent her, but they keep her in the family.  So she expects me to be the hated one and stay in her family, too – no thanks.  I wondered while reading this if Deb expected that of Dustin.  And now I understand exactly why the checked out “dad” allowed it.
 
Jennette didn’t talk about dad’s passive-aggressive treachery.  She didn’t talk about the Creator in a whole lot of detail.  She didn’t mention a lot of things where I was able to fill in the blanks for myself, especially after I spent an hour on the internet.  Now I know who Amanda Bynes is.  I can imagine which of the kids took the checks they were offered.  And I can see that Jennette McCurdy is a lighthouse of resilience.  I couldn’t be more happy or proud of her for writing this book.
 
I want to also thank her for drawing enough reviews on this outstanding book that I could see the same voices that hated my book for the same reasons.  I’m glad to be hated by them, and also that Jennette’s mom died.

 

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
3.5 Stars

TL;DR

Another thought-provoking, character-driven literary fiction read from Silvia Moreno-Garcia.  My go-to author always surprises me with many tidbits of Mexican culture, people and places that come alive – this time in more ways than one.  Again there is a dual protagonist in search of an elusive third character who is seen mostly in the negative until the end.  There’s an excellent discussion of PTSD and CPTSD, codependent relationships and boundaries.  Nazi occultism, racism and colonization in Mexico, gender and sexuality, and other social issues are examined.  The underlying theme, though, is about overcoming fear to find true power in authenticity and grounding.  

I remain agnostic on the actual ending of the book, between the protags.  I’m okay with it either way.  Not my decision to make.

Ultimately I can't give it a higher rating because I kept getting pulled out of the story by exposition, repetition, and things that felt too conveniently written.

***

I look forward to reading whatever Silvia Moreno-Garcia writes.  I eagerly read this one as soon as it became available (to me), shortly after finishing Velvet Was the Night, which is now an all-time favorite.  I’m glad I bought that one in hard copy.  The author seems to have almost lifted that successful narrative framework and reused it in Silver Nitrate, overlaying a somewhat jumbled magical system over it with confusing results.  The two stories track directly, right down to the true identity of the ancillary character's elusive rich relative.

While  Silver Nitrate also resonated deeply with me, and gave me quite a lot to think about, I really struggled with it.  Up until the 70% mark I thought this would be the first time this outstanding author would write a dud.  And I wouldn’t be mad.  Because it’s still a better book of literary fiction than most people will ever write.  But it did feel repetitive and often stretching disbelief.  This author does magical realism much better, I think, than hocus pocus.  The Beautiful Ones struck the perfect note IMO.

All of that overly complicated occult stuff is just mumbo jumbo for self-loathing people who wish they were special.  That’s why Nazis were into it. This is a book about weirdos trying to do spells in order to temporarily override natural processes.  I find all of that truly odd.

What I really did not expect was the thorough and accurate portrayals of both PTSD and CPTSD in Tristan and Montsterrat, respectively.  

I find the other characters in Moreno-Garcia’s books consistently relatable, or I wouldn’t bother reading them.  But this was the first time I found one of her characters personally identifiable:  Montserrat.  She has a very consistently authentic CPTSD personality type in which I immediately recognized myself.  I felt extraordinarily seen in an unexpected way as a person living with mental illness.  That meant a lot to me.

As a person living with PTSD and CPTSD since I was 7 years old, I was very pleasantly surprised by the rep of the two MCs in this book.  Living with both conditions since childhood, and as an author myself, that aspect of the book was a breath of fresh air and caught me quite by surprise.    I would recommend something that I have found to be very close to the “spell magic” attempted herein, every bit as powerful and profound as that stuff (which I do not believe in and wasn't scared of) appears to be.  I have created magic in my life by writing as described below.

But instead of whatever strange goals these cultists have, the goal you can achieve here is being happy and feeling good in your life:  The A-B-C worksheet.  https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/treatments/cognitive-processing-therapist.pdf  It’s on Page 62 of that pdf.  Page 61 has a helpful diagram.  

You might think of it as the Abracadabra worksheet, because real magic is super simple in my experience. You take a few minutes, half an hour tops, to be honest with yourself and rewrite your trauma.  Nothing about manifesting devil dogs or spinning lightning webs, only the emotional stuff and whatever you already saw when you went through the looking glass in your trauma.  

Once you work through that, there’s less desire for the weirdness.  You take the part of your life that feels stuck in your body, that’s wrecking your head, and you rewrite it with the words of your choice, just as Montserrat instinctively know to do in Silver Nitrate.  And the power magically appears in your body as soon as you write it.

Know how she learned that?  Because she grew up disabled and latchkey, like me. When there’s nowhere to go but through the darkness, you push to where you want to be.  After you’re already there, you don’t reach for the devil’s hand and follow.

While this book is ostensibly about two people who are into movies for different reasons (one an introverted sound technician, the other a vain, egocentric actor) who discover a racist cult using a film to cast spells, it’s definitely not a thriller.  It’s another book of literary fiction, like the other ones this author writes.  It’s about people and society, feelings.  It's about queer people from the wrong side of the tracks, who bond as children.

So those who are looking for a fast pace, or want it to be about the plot, will probably be disappointed.  Even for me as a literary reader there was maybe some extra dallying in the valley this time.  I was at the 70 percent mark thinking if there weren't so much synchronicity to my own life I would DNF.  And I quite enjoy the side trips.

All of her characters are relatable and draw me into the story.

However there were a few things that kept drawing me out of Silver Nitrate.  I wasn't bothered by the minutiae of her fandom OCD, because that's par for the course with that character's CPTSD personality.  The hocus pocus didn't scare me, the exposition was too convenient, the narrative seemed too formulaic from Velvet..  There's an info dump in a letter that seriously killed the boner in my brain.  I was surprised her editor left it in.  I was bouncing back and forth between feeling validated by the PTSD/CPSTD characters and annoyed.  It was jarring.  Also there's a running idea about clairvoyance involving sharp headaches that runs directly contrary to personal experience, and that's strongly reinforced throughout.  Not only does that contradict my personal experience, it's not what others have described to me in similar situations.  And I've seen my share of the dead people, so IDK.  The part where there's a silence you can't explain, or a fuller darkness, that sort of thing, yes.  But the information coming with pain, opposite.  And that's emphasized.

Trouble befalls Tristan and Abel, and not Montserrat, once they start dabbling in the dark things.  She doesn’t suffer in her life, because Montserrat doesn’t suffer from the same shortcomings that all of the others do:  self-loathing, and thus greed to take what someone else has/is.  

Montserrat is the only really honest one, happy with who she is and what she does.  She is the only one who wants nothing for herself, only for her sister.  She doesn’t do her work in the sound booth for money.  She’s placating her OCD, scratching that itch that I personally know all too well.  It’s part of CPTSD.  It started in early childhood and has never stopped.  But she’s otherwise grounded within herself in a way that the others aren’t.

**SPOILER** So when she rejects the deal Ewers offers her at the end, to become recognized as a hotshot editor, it isn’t that she’s some wizard superhero or whatever.  It’s that she can see that it’s all a lie.  It’s very simple.  He has nothing to offer in real life, and he never did.  How could she possibly trust him?  What is he without her anyway?  What does she need him for, when she’s never relied on anyone but herself, even as a child?  This is very evident to an old lady surviving with CPTSD.

Alcoholic, neglectful parents often have latchkey children who parent themselves.  When you spend enough time working real hard, all by yourself, and not getting rewarded – like Montserrat and I have – they can’t take that away from you.  You can’t cheat an honest survivor, basically.  It’s the same reason the elderly shaman gives Ewers a hard bounce when she feels/sees his two murders.  There was an automatic rightness to that tiny bit of the book that kept me reading on when I really wasn’t liking it overall. **END SPOILER**

I don’t generally read books with magic systems that need to be cleverly revealed.  I never read things with dragons, where people have names with ravens in them.  All of that starts feeling pretentious and pulling me out of the story right quick.  It feels like it’s for people who don’t like who they are, wish they were special instead of honing their specialties.

But this is a very skilled author.  And she deftly addresses the idea that a lot of occultism is for phonies and grifters preying on people who either (a) believe they were born special, or (b) will pay to become special.  That’s why it appeals to the colonizer mentality.  And the usual suspects are in the house:  Guido List, Aleister Crowley, and all the wannabes.  As Montserrat observes, they’re like magpies, these people, thieves at heart.

One thing I thought was funny was the references to Atlantis.  Atlantis is presumed to be both Aryan and thus infallible in this story.  My understanding of it is the opposite, that it was Aztlan, more of an Aztec offshoot civilization in the first place.  I’m not disagreeing with the author’s premise, that it’s a common Eurocentric conceit to believe that Atlantis was Greek/European. and aliens must have intervened in any complex indigenous technology.  There’s a reason the Spaniards destroyed all of the ancient Mayan codices pronto, before anybody else could make sense of them.

But also, if the Atlanteans were such infallible wizards, where are they now, tough guy?  LOL  Right?  I’m not saying they didn’t have highly advanced technology.  Only that they knew enough to destroy themselves.  

Also, there are still Mayans now.  They still speak Mayan languages, in Mayan villages.  Just not like back in the day. And they absolutely had advanced technologies that our current hotshot scientists still can't explain, like the sound phenomena at ball courts and temples.   We don't even know what-all they had back then, or what other cultures existed exactly.  There could be a whole "hidden in plain sight" thing, just saying.

The Atlanteans weren't super sorcerers because they were just people, like everybody else.  Because that’s how life works.  Because nobody is any different than anybody else, and they never were.  No one civilization is inherently greater or worse than any other, except in the eye of the beholder.  It’s all pretense, delusion, and stray emotion.  Moreno-Garcia makes that point very well in the book.

Despite being a big, pink weirdo, I’ve been honored with invitations to different indigenous events including pipe ceremonies and a sweat lodge.  Different things have happened.  I’ve seen and experienced things that I couldn’t understand or explain even if it were allowed, which a lot of the time it isn’t.  

There was never one second that I didn’t know for sure I had every resource I needed from the Earth.  The only fear I ever experienced was that which was already inside of me, what I brought to the table in the first place.  I saw and experienced things every bit as magical and amazing as referenced in this book, but nothing vaguely terrifying or “evil.”  It's a completely different concept.

Indigenous Mexicans know how to do their ofrendas.  If the Navajo need to smudge, they already know when and how to do it.  Nobody else needs to worry about any of this weird stuff mentioned in the book.  Such things are not real, which is why this book failed to scare me a la <i>Harry Potter</i>.  

What’s real would actually blow your mind.  But you’d have to give up the wizard fantasies to find out.  You’ll never be invited to learn while on this self-hatred tip.  People only need to learn these weird, complicated parlor tricks because they don't feel good enough.  And there are much easier ways to feel better about your life, like the A-B-C worksheet I posted above.  

I'm still not sorry I read this book.  But it's not her best.  Read this one if you're a movie buff.  It was cool to learn about chaneques.