Jennette McCurdy discovered man she thought was her dad wasn’t in her 20s
It wasn't until her mum died that she learned the man she thought was her biological father actually wasn't
Jennette McCurdy only discovered that the man she thought was her dad wasn't actually her biological father when she was in her 20s.
The iCarly star recently appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast, and the conversation turned towards her complicated relationship with her parents, which she's spoken about before.
McCurdy's relationship with her mother involved the former child star being subjected to physical, mental and sexual abuse, and she wrote a book after her mother's death titled I'm Glad My Mom Died where she detailed the controlling behaviour she went through.
Her mother died in 2013 when McCurdy was 21, and afterwards she learned that her mother's husband, the man she thought was her dad, actually wasn't.
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The author - who is soon set to release her debut novel, Half His Age - told the podcast host about her mother's death, and how she was 'able to just miss her sometimes', which she said was 'something that I will take full credit for'.
McCurdy, now 33, said her mother left her 'with a lot of s**t to parse through' and a major part of that was learning that the man she had thought was her dad actually wasn't.
She said: "The nail in the coffin being when I realized that when I found out from my, who I thought was my dad, that he was not in fact my dad.
"And that came a year and a half after her death. So that was the kind of piece of information that I needed to go, 'okay, let me consider that maybe this person didn't have my best interests at heart all the time'. Because she couldn't, because she wasn't capable of that."
McCurdy wondered why her mother never told her about it, even when she knew she was dying, as her mother 'knew she was dying' but still didn't say anything about it.
"She knew for years, when I was two I get why you don't tell your children then, she knew again when I was 18," the Nickelodeon star said.
"My siblings were all three, five and nine years older than I was, so we were at that age where we could have, it would have been uncomfortable, it would have been painful of course.
"I would have gotten the answers, I would have gotten some closure, and honestly, I would have respected her more. Like, say the f**king truth."
After learning the truth that her father was someone else, McCurdy did end up meeting her biological dad and explained that he said he knew about her and her brothers and had been waiting for them to contact him, with him not reaching out first because he didn't know if she knew he was her dad.
Her biological father told her his relationship with her mother didn't end well, and there had been a custody battle where her mum had accused her dad of being physically abusive, which he denied.
She told Drew Barrymore in 2022 that they met once a week for a few months before it 'got to a place where that one felt a little strange'.
Joe Harker