Jennette McCurdy Wants You To Feel Your Feelings

Her new podcast is a raw look at the rollercoaster that is being a human with emotions.

Early in her therapy journey, Jennette McCurdy found herself filling out a worksheet titled “How Do You Feel About Your Feelings?” It turns out the answer was complicated.

“I was shocked,” she remembers, “because I had so much judgment around my feelings that I wouldn’t have even realized was there. I had a lot of the frankly misogynistic judgements around being a woman with emotions: ‘I don’t want to be dramatic. I don’t want to be over-emotional. I don’t want to be sensitive.’”

Feelings remain a point of fascination for McCurdy, whose memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died became a bestseller when it came out last year, tapping into deep veins of grief and trauma and dissecting her past as a child star. McCurdy has said she enjoys the control writing gives her, so her new project is a bit of a curveball: an off-the-cuff-feeling podcast, Hard Feelings With Jennette McCurdy, in which she talks about whatever she happens to be feeling around the time of recording (past episode titles include shame, pressure, and bad mood—all uncapitalized, like Olivia Rodrigo songs.) The style is lo-fi, with McCurdy’s slamming hotel room door or a background siren cropping up in the audio. Each micro-episode feels as intimate as morning breath—like getting a voice memo from a friend, captured at that precise point between feeling something and analyzing it. In fact, the concept grew out of McCurdy’s longtime habit of recording voice memos for herself when she was in the throes of a particular emotion.