On the day of her mother’s funeral, Jennette McCurdy found herself laughing. It was 2013, and Debra McCurdy had succumbed to a recurrence of the cancer she was first diagnosed with when her daughter was just two. The now 30-year-old recalls sitting alongside her brothers—Marcus, Dustin, and Scottie—as pallbearers struggled to get their mother’s casket into the viewing room. The edges of her casket bumped into the doorframe, chipping its paint. “My brother leans over and goes, ‘How much do you want to bet they’re going to drop the casket, mom’s body’s going to roll out, and she’s going to start yelling at all of us?’” McCurdy tells Vanity Fair with a chuckle. “And we all started laughing because we needed to. I think that’s so often the case, certainly in my life, when there’s those more tragic moments.”

Mining life’s tragedy for humor is at the center of McCurdy’s explosive debut memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, out August 9. In it, the former Nickelodeon headliner delves into the toll child stardom and a fraught relationship with her mother took as she achieved the height of her fame on high-energy sitcoms iCarly and Sam & Cat.

The book’s provocative title and cover, which features McCurdy wryly smiling as she cradles a hot pink urn overflowing with confetti, is purposefully attention-grabbing. (Based on the strength of preorders alone, it has already become a number one best seller.) But McCurdy argues that her sentiment is justified by the book’s pages. “I stand by the title and I believe in it. It was a tough thing for me to come to terms with,” she explains. “And the things that are difficult to come to terms with are often the things that need to be said the most.”

McCurdy has lived a life that could fill five memoirs. Born in Southern California, at age six she was pushed into the entertainment industry by her mother (“You want to be Mommy’s little actress?”). She had to orient her entire existence around Debra’s manipulation and mood swings. Looking over the glow of candles on her sixth birthday cake, McCurdy writes, “I lock eyes with Mom so she’ll know I care about her, that she’s my priority.” When I ask about this scene, an early indicator of what will define their abusive dynamic, McCurdy notes that it’s “often those tiny little micro human interactions that carry the most significance.” She trails off. “Now, I’m literally just thinking of various facial expressions of my mom.”

After years acting in commercials and TV shows including Malcolm in the Middle and Law & Order: SVU, McCurdy broke out in 2007 when she was cast as the scene-stealing prankster Sam Puckett in Nickelodeon’s iCarly. She spent six seasons on the series about a wacky weekly web show—sharing her real-life first kiss in an episode that was watched by nearly 6 million people and enduring abuse allegedly perpetrated by her boss, who is referred to only as “The Creator” in McCurdy’s book.

“I chose to name him ‘The Creator’ because I find it entertaining and sort of fitting for the person,” McCurdy says of the man who allegedly offered her alcohol when she was underage (“The Victorious kids get drunk together all the time. The iCarly kids are so wholesome”) and gave her a massage. Writes McCurdy, “I feel similarly around The Creator as I feel around Mom—on edge, desperate to please, terrified of stepping out of line.”

Behind the scenes of her star-making vehicle, McCurdy suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety about her newly acquired celebrity, and a crippling anorexia that was introduced by McCurdy’s mother as “calorie restriction.” She was also subjected to “breast and vaginal exams” from Debra, who would shower with her until age 16, under the pretense of checking McCurdy for cancer. “The vignette that came to me last, that was toughest to write about, was the showering vignette,” McCurdy says. “I went through quite a few drafts before even writing a first draft of that. I didn’t feel quite…” she pauses. “Let’s see here…It was just a more difficult and uncomfortable vignette to write about for me.”

However painful to recount, McCurdy was committed to plainly detailing the ways in which her mother controlled her body. “For me, it was really important to write about eating disorders with as much frankness and bluntness as possible,” she explains. “I didn’t want to tiptoe around anything. That would be a disservice to my own recovery and to anyone who has struggled, or is struggling with eating disorders. I think people who experience eating disorders are intuitive, sensitive people, and they know if something’s being skirted around or not being said honestly, or being romanticized.”

In the latter years of iCarly, both McCurdy’s mother and The Creator dangled the possibility of a spin-off—one that McCurdy was led to believe she’d headline solo. Instead, she wound up sharing top billing with Ariana Grande, who reprised her Victorious role for Sam & Cat—a project McCurdy writes she was “humiliated to be a part of.” Tensions rose when McCurdy says that Grande was permitted to pursue her pop star aspirations, while she was prevented from accepting movie offers.

On top of it all, McCurdy’s mother was dying, hospitalized for a portion of the show’s run. “I’d go from slinging a buttersock and shouting my cheesy lines on the brightly colored, overlit, Sam & Cat soundstage to sitting in a hospital bedside chair with outdated upholstery, surrounded by the smell of sanitization and the feel of death,” McCurdy writes.

In the months following Debra’s death, Sam & Cat would meet its own demise after releasing just 35 episodes. By the end of the show, The Creator had “gotten in trouble from the network for accusations of his emotional abuse” and was “no longer allowed to be on set with any actors,” McCurdy writes. Instead, he would bark orders from “a small cave-like room off to the side of the soundstage, surrounded by piles of cold cuts, his favorite snack, and Kids’ Choice Awards, his most cherished life accomplishment.”

Reports of Sam & Cat’s cancellation painted McCurdy as a spurned costar, jealous of Grande’s salary and soaring singing career. But in reality, McCurdy writes that she was being offered $300,000 in “hush money” by Nickelodeon if she kept quiet about her experiences at the network, a deal she declined to take. (Vanity Fair has reached out to Nickelodeon for comment.) McCurdy says this chapter “was something that I owed to myself to share.”

The death of McCurdy’s mother was not immediately freeing. Instead, it sent McCurdy headfirst into a grab bag of coping mechanisms, including dysfunctional romantic relationships, bulimia, and alcoholism. She attempted to bury the struggles and reignite a spark for acting with two seasons on the dystopian Netflix series Between. But McCurdy writes that her destructive habits and acting had begun to entwine. “I’ve finally started to take some control of my relationship with food,” she writes, “and the healthier that relationship becomes, the more unhealthy a career in acting seems for me.”

At age 24, McCurdy would leave the profession her mother had forced upon her, and later decline an offer from former costar and real-life friend Miranda Cosgrove to appear in the Paramount+ iCarly reboot. Yet when asked if the tides have turned on her decision to leave acting, McCurdy offers a surprising answer.

“A couple months back—this is very fresh and very new—I had a feeling of, ‘You know what? I think there might be a world in which acting can be something that’s healing for me, as opposed to this thing that’s weighted down and bogged down by all the baggage from my past and my relationship with my mom,’” McCurdy says. “That hit me very suddenly. And it shocked me, because when I put acting aside it felt so important to me.

“I see that as being really important to where I was at the time, but now I’m at a different place. Largely because of writing this book and how fulfilling that has been for me, I’m now at this place where there might be a way for me to write a role for myself or something where I can heal my relationship with acting.”

While the door has been opened, McCurdy says she still rejects society’s impulse to track and dissect the lives of former child stars. “There’s such a gross fascination and deep intrigue in child stars and the evolution of their careers and personal lives,” she says. “I don’t know what that is, but I wish I could ask everybody on the outside, ‘What’s going on here? Is everyone okay? Why is everybody obsessed with child stars? Does everybody need some therapy?’ Yes, is the answer.”

In the years since she first left acting, McCurdy penned essays about her experiences for The Wall Street Journal, Seventeen, and HuffPost. She began performing a one-woman show also called I’m Glad My Mom Died in Los Angeles and New York City and launched her podcast, Empty Inside. After years of internal work and sessions with her “lovely therapist,” McCurdy began the year-and-a-half-long process of writing her memoir.

Given the book’s title and how much of McCurdy’s life was devoted to earning her mother’s approval, I ask if the writing process brought her mother’s influence back to the forefront. “I would feel her. I could feel her presence,” she says. “Something that came up for me a lot in writing her dialogue was how funny her voice is, even just thinking of the rhythm that she spoke with, which I can feel so vividly. And a cadence, her word choices—she really had a lot of inherent humor to her. She didn’t know she was funny. When she would try to be funny, it was a disaster. But just who she was, I think had a lot of built-in humor there.”

Relinquishing this story also allowed McCurdy to unfurl her grief more fully. “I would feel really sad, longing for her and missing her,” she explains. “Then I’d feel I was just fantasizing, and that wasn’t reality. So I’d feel angry at her. I’d feel she didn’t deserve my sadness. It was very complicated. And since finishing the book, I’m able to miss her without it being so complicated. I’m able to just have a simpler grief experience, which—as strange as it sounds—is a relief. A relieving grief.”

McCurdy will continue to draw upon her personal life for future projects, including a collection of essays. But there is solace in having unearthed so much of her trauma already, a fact McCurdy can’t help but find humor in. “I laugh because I never could have imagined what it would feel like to be on the other side of those events, and to be able to write about them,” she says, wistful. “I couldn’t see that far. I couldn’t see that light at the end of the tunnel, oftentimes. So to be able to be here now, it feels really empowering.”