The Examined Year
A Self-Examination Tool
By Jennette McCurdy
December 8, 2026
From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Half His Age and I'm Glad My Mom Died—a deeply personal and introspective guided journal and goal planning system that asks questions to help you build the life you want from the inside out.
“I’ve succeeded at someone else’s idea of a good life. I don’t recommend it. To succeed at my own version of a good life, it took honest, sustained introspection. This book is a tool to carry you through a year of it.”
—Jennette McCurdy
Most guided journals and planners fail the reader in one of two ways. They’re either too soft, all affirmations and vision boards, beautiful and completely untethered from who you actually are, or too tactical, treating your life like a logistics problem to be optimized while skipping the only question that actually matters: Who are you, really?
The Examined Year is a tool to carry you through a year of introspection. It’s a guide to understanding what you actually value. A grounded, simple system for setting and accomplishing goals that are genuinely yours. A record of who you’re becoming, what you’re learning, and what you’re ready to leave behind.
McCurdy developed the self-discovery strategies in this journal from her own hard-earned experience. She asks readers to measure each of their values against concrete evidence from their own lives, catching performative and unrealistic values before they send readers chasing the wrong goals for another year. Readers will then use their core values to inform their goals, ones that McCurdy feels should be process-based rather than outcome-based, internally motivated rather than externally prescribed, and tethered to who the reader actually is rather than who they think they should be. With monthly and quarterly check-ins that allow flexibility to abandon and revise goals without shame, The Examined Year is a forgiving and empowering tool that recognizes time as an integral part of the self-discovery process.
McCurdy’s voice throughout is the one already known and trusted by her readers: sharp, self-aware, funny, and unflinchingly honest. Her prompts don’t coddle. They don’t congratulate. They ask you to get real with yourself.
And they don’t make you wait for January 1. Whatever day you’re holding this book, that’s day one.
Selected Praise for Half His Age
“Assured, provocative… Cements [McCurdy’s] standing as a talented writer… Articulates the vulnerability of girlhood with guts, humor, and just the slightest whisper of warmth.” —The New York Times
“Eerie and unsettling and believable.” —Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl
“McCurdy is a fearless and darkly funny writer with an unerring eye for the perfect mortifying detail.” —Tom Perrotta, author of The Empathy Exams and Election
“Like picking up a downed power line, so full of rage and want and, well, electricity, that I couldn’t put it down. In her scorching account of a high school student and her teacher, McCurdy gets at some hard truths about what we want out of relationships, and what we actually get.”
—Ann Patchett, author of Whistler and Tom Lake, in Oprah Daily
“Jennette McCurdy writes sentences that glimmer and cut like razors. With Half His Age, she delivers a deeply felt and humorous tale about the dangers of youth and desire—this novel is uncomfortable, unpredictable, and unputdownable.” —Aria Aber, author of Good Girl
“This is a bold and unapologetic novel for edge-seekers, doom-scrollers, latchkey kids, horn-dogs, and all those who love hard.”
—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“McCurdy’s furious writing—her dystopian rendering of a culture squandering its dreams and desires on the crack high of cheap stuff—is hard to tear yourself away from.” —The Atlantic
“[A] revenge story, one where McCurdy excavates emotions she herself had at seventeen. And if it makes you angry, about feminism or rampant consumerism or the power dynamics in age-gap relationships, even better—McCurdy still is, too.”
—Rolling Stone
“Hilarious, gross, disturbing, poignant.” —The Washington Post
“A writer able to capture some of the darkest parts of human nature with unflinching honesty and devastating humor.” —NPR
“A bleak, often hilarious and uncomfortable triumph that underscores McCurdy’s talent for focusing in on the multilayered nature of trauma and artfully unpicking it, one scab at a time.” —The Guardian
“Brimming with teenage angst and McCurdy’s signature dark humor… This is far from a romance, and it’s not a glamorization of age gaps—it’s an analysis of consumerism, insecurity, misguided desire, class, and addiction.” —USA Today
“As unapologetic and undeniable as its young protagonist… McCurdy treats Waldo’s want with an almost reverent seriousness.” —Elle
“Haunting, hilarious, and heart-rending… a coming-of-age story that refuses easy answers—the kind McCurdy tells best.” —Bustle
“[I was] unable to stop turning the pages… Written with an unrelenting energy, Half His Age marks a new chapter for Jennette McCurdy.” —BuzzFeed
“[McCurdy] has created a brilliant teenage character who won’t play the victim… You can think of this as a post-MeToo novel in that it is beadily intelligent about the currents of predation without feeling the need to deliver lectures.” —The Times (UK)
“An unflinching, uncomfortable tale of power dynamics and disaffected youth… McCurdy’s voice is all her own: clear-eyed realism coupled with emotional honesty.” —The Independent
“Bold and brash… A vivid picture of all that we dismiss when it comes to the complexity of a young woman’s desire… With each of her books, McCurdy continues to lean into the uncomfortable conversations that end up leading the discourse.”
—Harper’s Bazaar
“With her electric debut novel, Jennette McCurdy has established herself as one of the most exciting literary voices of our time.” —Carley Fortune
About the Author
Jennette McCurdy is the author of two previous bestselling books: Half His Age, her debut novel, and I’m Glad My Mom Died, winner of the 2023 American Library Association Alex Award and the 2022 Goodreads Choice Award for Memoir & Autobiography. McCurdy’s work has been published in more than thirty countries and has sold more than four million copies. McCurdy is creating, writing, executive producing, and showrunning an Apple TV series loosely inspired by I’m Glad My Mom Died, starring Jennifer Aniston.
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