Knowledge is power, so the saying goes – and where there is power, there is abuse. At 18, former child star Jennette McCurdy commenced a secret romance with a 32-year-old co-worker on the set of Nickelodeon’s iCarly. While McCurdy stops short of calling it abuse, she has since described the relationship as “creepy” and “twisted”.

McCurdy’s debut novel, Half His Age, follows 17-year-old Waldo as she pursues a relationship with her 40-year-old creative writing teacher, Mr Korgy.

This post-#MeToo novel is a compelling new entry in dark academia, a popular genre obsessed with power and its corruptions. It dissects intellectual elitism and moral decay within the hierarchies of schools and universities.

“I’ve been fantasising about him all class,” Waldo confesses. “Fantasies I didn’t even know I had about things I didn’t even know I wanted.”

Gross and gripping, the novel refuses to moralise, but simmers with a barely concealed anger – fitting for a writer who describes rage as “one of the most, if not the most, useful emotions”.

In a recent interview, McCurdy said: “Any time I’ve felt genuine rage about something, it’s put my life on a corrective path that I have never looked back from.”

Half His Age is an uncomfortable read, but it resists easy categorisation. It’s not a neat narrative of sexual abuse. Nor is it a textbook tale of grooming. It reminds us there is no single, correct way for writers and readers to engage with stories about female desire and power.

Age-gap relationships

McCurdy’s memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, sold more than three million copies and is being adapted for an Apple TV series starring Jennifer Aniston.

In pacy, unsparing prose, McCurdy recounts how she was coerced into acting by her narcissistic mother – a mean, controlling woman who emotionally and physically abused her daughter. She introduced McCurdy to anorexia at 11, to delay puberty and secure more acting roles. Her mother’s hoarding was so severe, McCurdy and her brothers slept on mats in the living room.

McCurdy writes about her own age-gap relationship in her memoir:

My co-worker Joe […] keeps touching me. At first I couldn’t tell if it was an accident since I know he’s in his thirties and has a girlfriend, but now it’s happened so many times that I’m sure it’s on purpose. I say........

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