Half His Age

**Author:** Jennette McCurdy **Estimated Reading Time:** 22 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The gravitational pull of unavailable people, the stories we tell ourselves to survive our own longing, and the slow, unglamorous work of learning to want less from those who cannot give more.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who have ever mistaken intensity for intimacy, who have loved someone they knew would never choose them back, and who understand that sometimes the bravest thing a person can do is walk away from the very thing they thought they needed.

Waldo is seventeen years old, living in a cramped Anchorage apartment with a mother who communicates through sticky notes and spends most nights at her boyfriend Tony's place. She works at Victoria's Secret, eats frozen lasagna alone, and fills the hollow hours with online shopping carts she knows will not fix anything. She has just ended things with Randy Julep, a boy whose loop-de-loop tongue and staccato thrusting were the final evidence that whatever she is looking for, she has not found it. Then she walks into a creative writing class and meets Mr. Korgy. He is forty years old, married, a father, and on the first day of class he stands before his students and announces that he is a failure. He wanted to be a novelist. He chose comfort instead. He says this without self-pity, or with just enough self-pity to make it sound like honesty. Waldo is not attracted to his thinning hair or his purple cardigan. She is attracted to the fact that he named his regret out loud. She has never heard anyone do that before. What follows is not a love story in the way we usually mean that phrase. It is a story about two people using each other as an escape hatch from lives they cannot bear to look at directly. Korgy is trapped in a marriage he entered out of obligation, haunted by the death of his younger sister, stalled in a career that reminds him daily of the novelist he never became. Waldo is trapped in the aftermath of a childhood that taught her she was hard to love, chasing a man who can offer her only fragments of attention and calling those fragments proof of her worth. The tone of the novel is intimate and unflinching. McCurdy writes with the same raw clarity that made her memoir so devastating, but here she is working in fiction, which means she can push scenes further, linger in the uncomfortable places, and let her protagonist make choices that feel both inevitable and unbearable to witness. The atmosphere is cold in the way Alaska is cold: beautiful from a distance, punishing up…