Over the years, including stars Janet McCurdy and Macaulay Culkin have discussed hitting rock bottom with their parents.
Janet broke down the violence she encountered for her mother, Debra McCurdy, in her memoir, I’m glad my mother passed away.
“Of course, there are times when I fantasize that my mom would apologize or that we would have a turnaround in our relationship, but that’s a fantasy,” she told Vogue in August 2022 “That’s a big part of what the book is about for me, we don’t need to romanticize the dead and validate our own experiences with them.”
She continued: “I feel very confident that if my mother was still alive, I would still have an eating disorder. I would still have a lot of mental health issues. I’m sure she and I would still be living in the same place and I wouldn’t have had a chance to be in a relationship or have friends. I have no doubt that my life would still be controlled by her if she were alive.
Culkin, for his part, also had second thoughts his decision to take a step back from the limelight amid problems with his parents. “People assume I’m crazy, or a fool, or damaged. Strange. Cracked. And until the last year or two, I didn’t perform there at all. So I can understand that,” Culkin said Esquire in March 2020 “It’s also like, well, everyone, stop being shocked as hell that I’m relatively well-adjusted.”
After legally removing his mother and father from his trust fund as a teenager, the actor opted to hire an executor for his finances. For Culkin, the solution came with some public misconceptions.
“It’s always been misconstrued that I ’emancipated’ myself from my parents,” he said at the time. “The story was that I divorced my parents. I just thought I was doing it cleanly – removing my father’s name, removing my mother’s name, so my opinion is unbiased. And when I did, it was over a lot faster.
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