Anna Marie Tendler has always been a writer. Over a decade ago, Tendler gave beauty advice on a now-defunct Tumblr blog, eventually publishing two books on makeup and hairstyling. On her blog, she writes with a confessional, self-aware tone — even as her life became increasingly public during her marriage to comedian John Mulaney, she manages to seem approachable and relatable in her curiosities and passions. In the aftermath of her tumultuous divorce in 2021 from Mulaney, whose comedy often touched on his relationship with Tendler, her work, including several ongoing photography projects, was quieter, more evasive. While sharing news of her memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy, in March of 2024, Tendler wrote on Instagram: “You didn’t think I was just taking photos of sunsets and seashores this whole time, did you?†The memoir is, per Tendler’s words, about mental health and womanhood as well as “the endless source of my heartbreak and rage — men.†The text, which spans late 2020 to 2023, is dense with what Tendler feels is righteous anger, but that outward rage clouds the memoir’s best and brightest moments.
First things first: For all that men have, as per Tendler’s title, “called her crazy,†there’s little, if nothing, to say about her publicized separation from Mulaney. If you’re looking for the singular account of one of the more highly publicized and divisive divorce announcements, well, this isn’t the memoir for that. (There will probably never be a memoir for that.) “When you write a memoir, you don’t have to clear anything with anybody,†she told her followers in an Instagram Q&A, “but the thing is, there isn’t anyone in my book that’s well-known.†Whether Tendler is withholding her most public breakup out of mutual respect or some kind of separation nondisclosure agreement (as has been speculated), the book doesn’t need the inclusion of Mulaney to prove its point. Several unhealthy and harmful relationships with men (and some women!) over Tendler’s life contributed to her mental-health struggles, enhancing her anxiety and paranoia and self-doubt.
What’s always been impressive about Tendler’s work — outside the written word — is her attention to detail and aesthetics, from her makeup blog to her custom-beaded lampshades to her photography work. While Tendler makes mention of all these practices, particularly her struggle to produce within the confines of cosmetology school or her graduate program, we never get a strong sense of what actually inspires her or what she’s trying to say with her work. She’s clearly proud of the skill she’s shown, but it’s hard to grasp what the art ever means in her life because such asides are derailed — as she is — by memories of men. She undercuts the artistry of the memoir itself by dredging up the past, even when it’s unremarkable. Even scenes of art therapy that take place during her program feel rushed or ignored. For someone whose output feels constant, the reader comes away with little sense of what pushes Tendler to continue to create.
Make no mistake, Tendler’s book is often harrowing, with detailed descriptions of self-harm and disordered eating; her time at an inpatient treatment center, having struggled with suicidal ideation; and her less recent past, described through incidents and memories that seem to suggest there was an inevitability to her struggles. While Tendler’s confessional writing style is reminiscent of a long email from a friend or dishy voice note, her memoir is anything but a gossipy tell-all. Instead, she anchors the book with her own psychological evaluations and slow, meticulous attempts to heal in a world seemingly designed to prevent that.
Yet for all that the memoir touts itself as Tendler reclaiming her own story, she comes back to men over and over again — focusing, blaming, and elucidating factors that feel neither original nor compelling. At the end of the book (which leaves off, quite anticlimactically, in the present of Tendler’s life after a few anecdotes about post-divorce boyfriends), Tendler reviews her own psychoanalysis from her time in treatment with a heated rebuttal: “What I see here is deflection and denial of the ways men have impacted my psyche. What I see here is that rejection of rage toward the patriarchal structures that govern nearly every aspect of my life couldn’t possibly be my authentic reality. No, there must be something else at the root, something that has nothing to do with the men at all. Something that has to do with women. Let’s blame women.†This relentless gender-essentialist rehashing feels, however lived in and true to Tendler’s experiences, dated and unexplored in any serious way. Tendler can’t square how to both love men and live under patriarchy — something writers, philosophers, and essayists have long been pondering. It’d be one thing if Tendler explored this aspect of her trauma, but her hyperfocus on the specific men she’s known, rather than the systems they embody, renders the argument tedious.
The heart of Tendler’s book is her relationship with the women in her life; the memoir itself is dedicated to the women who “held [her] hand when she was lost.†Interspersed between memories of bad men from her past are Tendler’s scenes with the women at the hospital with her — their identities likely obscured — and the ways in which they form tentative, sweet relationships, encouraging each other’s recovery and bonding in silence while watching bad television. These scenes, combined with Tendler’s detailing of her relationship with her mother, make for some of the best and most moving writing in the book, to say nothing of a very beautiful chapter on her French bulldog, Petunia, toward the end. There’s another chapter in which Tendler and a pregnant friend get into an uncomfortable standoff about Tendler’s reluctance to lose a friend to motherhood — this type of thorny, compelling writing feels challenging and exciting, with few right answers and uneasy conversations. She appears to reach a conclusion that the women in her life are far more important than these men without giving them the space on the page to be that, brushing these relationships aside to dig up another story about an unfulfilling or damaging relationship. These women saved her, just as Tendler saved herself — if only they all got a little more credit.