Reckoning with the Long Literary Tradition of Age-Gap Relationships

Jennette McCurdy has spent the past few years telling the world her story. The actress became a household name as the comedic sidekick of iCarly, a Nickelodeon sitcom. She was fifteen when the first season aired. For the eight years afterwards, McCurdy kept her family’s finances afloat and endured the most extreme levels of teenage trauma: alcoholism, an eating disorder, abuse. After her mother’s death in 2013, it took McCurdy a little less than a decade to publish her blockbuster memoir about the event and its aftermath; I’m Glad My Mom Died was released to a round of rave reviews, the kind which open a lot of doors if you want to be a writer in earnest.

McCurdy’s second book, Half His Age, was released earlier this year. It is her debut novel, not a memoir, though you might be forgiven for confusing the two; McCurdy has slowly built these little bridges between the book and her own life, certain themes which seem to suggest a developing throughline for her literary career. Half His Age follows Waldo, an independent teenage girl with a complicated relationship to her mother. She doesn’t care much for school, but she loves writing. Her teacher Mr. Korgy takes notice; they soon start a secret, sexual relationship. The novel is frequently painful to read, which I mean as a compliment; sex scenes are graphic, but never gratuitous, focusing on bodily fluids in all their sticky, glooping glory. It’s a deeply personal text. After all, McCurdy has candidly drawn from her own age-gap affair.

As a character, Waldo’s voice has a confessional quality, a rapid-fire line of internal questioning scripted with swiftly moving prose. She describes her skincare routine before a date with Mr. Korgy: “I scoop a dollop of sugar scrub onto my legs and scape it into every pore. There can never be too much scraping, too much sloughing off, of a woman’s body. What is a woman, really, if not silky? If not smooth? If not supple, perky, and poreless?” When Mr. Korgy waxes poetic about his own artistic influences, as older men are wont to do, he cites F. Scott Fitzgerald, David Foster Wallace, Don Quixote. The ever-obstinate Waldo declares: “I like writing that’s simple. Plainly stated observations, no fluff. Get to the point, you know?”

McCurdy shares this sentiment, it seems. There’s a generous brevity to her sentences; this style was also true of her memoir, where such an approach was often accurately characterized as a specific comedic voice – “searingly personal,” “painfully funny.” It can be difficult to parse McCurdy’s voice from Waldo’s, but she would be far from the first writer in such a tradition to have difficulty separating the two. In an interview with Bustle, McCurdy explains: “There’s this quote: ‘How will I know what I think until I see what I say?’ And that’s exactly how I feel about my writing process, and really my life, because writing is how I process everything.”

I guess I know what she means. I had my own age-gap affair long before I’d ever read about one, and even longer before I’d ever written about one. For years afterward, I found myself drawn to these stories, so powerful is the gravitational pull of this canon. I read Luster by Raven Leilani, A Thirst for Salt by Madeleine Lucas, The Lover by Marguerite Duras. I spent ten years struggling to understand myself, why my naïveté appealed to an older man. The older I get, the more I find my own generation increasingly preoccupied with the morality of the age-gap romance, in real life as much as in fiction.

A love affair can take a lifetime to understand, to place specific words in the right order and have it match the sentiment of your experience. Draft after draft, you read it back. You try again. Writing is a process of understanding.

Age-gap discourse is what it’s come to be called, rearing its ugly head on social media every now and then.The trope reveals itself in salacious, “spicy” lists online, in Goodreads tags with popular subgenres: billionaire age gap, forbidden age gap, taboo age gap, small town age gap, slow burn age gap. There’s one subgenre, reverse age gap, which refers to a relationship where the woman is older and the man is younger, because we must presume that the power dynamic between an older man and younger woman is the one that is normal.

In her essay, “Men Explain Lolita to Me,” Rebecca Solnit ruminates on our capacity to empathize with Lolita, perhaps the most well-known and widespread point of reference for such discourse; Solnit quotes Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: “Lolita belongs to a category of victims who have no defense and are never given a chance to articulate their own story,” Nafisi writes. “As such she becomes a double victim—not only her life but also her life story is taken from her.” Lolita, of course, is not a real person; she is a character in a book. It isn’t her fault that her victimization is a reference, her name a byword for abuse. The point that Solnit makes with the piece is that art is subjective, that empathy is a matter of framing; the only remaining reclamation of power is the capacity to tell, and retell, the story.

If Waldo had ended up with Mr. Korgy, if they had somehow made it all work and gotten married and spent their entire lives together, Half His Age would probably look a little more like Jill Ciment’s 2024 memoir Consent. Ciment spent most of her career writing about her marriage in one way or another, the relationship with her art teacher Arnold that began when she was 17 and he was 47. She writes about how, early on, she tried to configure a fictional version of her own story where the reader could empathize with a Lolita figure, as Solnit proposes. “I could not imagine how the story would end. Lolita and Humbert Humbert marry and live happily ever after?” Ciment wonders. “Who would believe a scene in which Lolita takes Humbert Humbert for cataract surgery? How would I compose the scene where Lolita arranges hospice care for the man who stole her childhood?”

This tension between Ciment, the young wife, and Ciment, the adult memoirist, pulls at the center of Consent. It’s the kind of book that can only be written in the latter half of a writer’s career. Ciment first put their story into words with Half a Life, a memoir published when she was in her forties and her husband was in his seventies; this version ends before she began to take care of him at his bedside, administering palliative care. It wasn’t until her later work that she began to interrogate the very form itself. “While writing a memoir, the time it takes to recreate a moment from your past is usually longer than the time it took to live the actual moment,” she writes in Consent. “The memory of writing the memoir slowly accumulates until it usurps the events you are trying to capture.” A love affair can take a lifetime to understand, to place specific words in the right order and have it match the sentiment of your experience. Draft after draft, you read it back. You try again. Writing is a process of understanding.

Here’s an example: I first pitched this piece in March, upon the initial release of Jennette McCurdy’s novel. I had never written about my own experience except in the most elliptical sense. He had been my ballroom dance teacher; I found myself trying to understand our power dynamic through movement and metaphor. Words failed, or felt false. I grew increasingly terrified of anything I could put on the page. Every graph gave me trouble. Even as I tried to relay the relevant plot details of Half His Age, I couldn’t decide at what age I should describe a girl as a young woman instead. Was it a matter of age, or maturity, or circumstance? What did I consider Waldo? What did I consider myself?

I feel a kinship, now, to these women; we belong to a rich literary history. This thing that happened to me—but such a construction removes my own agency, doesn’t it?

Annie Ernaux writes extensively in her diaries about her desire to negate this precarious sense of self, a career-long endeavor. In one excerpt from the forthcoming publication of these texts, Ernaux writes: “Do I only want to talk about myself now? To write in the way a painter does a still life, adding the world in like an extra? Which of course puts an end to characters, even the ‘I’.” This entry was from 1970. She revisits the idea again in 2001, as she is beginning to write what will one day become The Years: “I realize I’m working on two texts that are both, in different ways, a refusal of the self, a refusal to exist.” There’s a desire to, in Ernaux’s words, remove the “I,” to render a “collective vision” of the time period. She spends years struggling with the manuscript; the diaries show an agonizing negotiation between herself and the page.

A Girl’s Story was published nearly ten years after The Years, this culmination of Ernaux’s struggle with the form. Here, too, she creates a distance between herself, the writer, and her self, the young girl. That’s the word she uses, pointedly and repeatedly, la fille, “girl.” It wouldn’t be fair to say that one is a real person and the other is a character, but that both are characters, fictional constructions. “I too wanted to forget about that girl. Really forget her, that is, stop yearning to write about her,” she says. “Stop thinking that I have to write about this girl and her desire and her madness, her idiocy and her pride, her hunger and her blood that ceased to flow.” This is writing as exorcism. Only later can you parse out fact and fiction, memoir and story and narrative.

After a rather explosive end to the age-gap relationship with my dance teacher, I remember coasting through the world as if in a daze. I considered dropping out of college. I called my childhood therapist, who’d once borne witness to the earliest of my feminist awakenings, angry and petulant, and now I had to explain to her that my life had been irrevocably affected by a man. He was not even a particularly good man. Is good the right word? I look up the synonyms for “good”: exceptional, satisfactory, pleasing. He was none of these things. He was notable only because he had been the first, and had done this kind of damage before.

I feel a kinship, now, to these women; we belong to a rich literary history. This thing that happened to me—but such a construction removes my own agency, doesn’t it? I always thought of desire as a form of power, an exertion of force over things in the world. This is simply desire in the abstract. The only version of empowerment left is the process by which we might understand ourselves. In one diary entry from 2001, Ernaux writes: “I have so little sense of living what I’m living while I live it that I have to relive it to finally live it.”