6/10
Although herself an accomplished photographer, visual artist, lampshade designer, and celebrity makeup artist, Anna Marie Tendler is best known for her seven-year marriage to comedian John Mulaney. Regular mentions in his sets have made Tendler a public figure and fan favorite. This popularity only increased the anticipation of her new memoir Men Have Called Her Crazy, which many readers expected to center around her and Mulaney’s divorce.
Unfortunately for those readers, the book steers clear of any details of her divorce or the identity of her ex-husband. She makes a couple of references to her marriage “falling apart,” but leaves the reader to fill in the gaps. The memoir instead alternates between accounts of her voluntary week-long stay at a women’s inpatient psychiatric facility in early 2021 and flashbacks to significant relationships with other men throughout her life.
Tendler’s purposeful exclusion of Mulaney is aligned with the goals of the book: to criticize the patriarchy. Tendler proves that she has interesting life experiences beyond her famous ex-husband; she is not just John Mulaney’s ex-wife. However, this strategy leaves gaps in her life story: it’s hard to imagine that a decade in the public eye did not shape Tendler and her current relationship with men.
However, this strategy leaves gaps in her life story: it’s hard to imagine that a decade in the public eye did not shape Tendler and her current relationship with men.
Mulaney’s exclusion and lack of discussion of her own celebrity status also separates Men Have Called Her Crazy from the rest of the celebrity memoir genre. This exclusion is not necessarily a bad thing, but Tendler fails to meet the higher expectations of quality writing and storytelling needed in memoirs that do not rely on stories of fame.
Tendler’s writing and structure are neither too distracting nor bad, but there are times when she gets caught up in unnecessary details. Every moment of free time or minor activity at the hospital is discussed with the same level of detail as her admission. Tendler makes up for this, however, with an admirable level of vulnerability; the memoir is one of a growing number of open accounts of someone struggling with mental health and receiving help.
This exclusion is not necessarily a bad thing, but Tendler fails to meet the higher expectations of quality writing and storytelling needed in memoirs that do not rely on stories of fame.
For the first 200 or so pages of her 300-page memoir, Tendler walks readers through every step of admission to the psychiatric hospital, every doctor she met with, and every day at the facility, no matter how mundane. The section is repetitive at times but interspersed with candid analysis of her own mental health issues. She is extremely self-aware at points, writing that she “identified deeply with [self-harm], as if it was a core part of [her] personality that had to be known by the men who saw [her] naked.”
In these first two-thirds of her memoir, Tendler highlights the relationships she formed with the other women in the hospital. Her writing here is incredibly tender and the way she continues to mention them throughout the book is touching. “I miss them and I wonder if they remember me,” Tendler writes in her final chapter.
In between days at the hospital, Tendler recounts her various substandard relationships with men during her teens and twenties. Her stories are interesting and unfortunately not uncommon—ghosting, older men, inequitable finances— but Tendler fails to explain why these relationships led to her extreme hatred of all men ever. Still, the commentary she includes in these flashbacks is much more interesting than her analysis of her post-divorce relationships.
Her stories are interesting and unfortunately not uncommon—ghosting, older men, inequitable finances— but Tendler fails to explain why these relationships led to her extreme hatred of all men ever.
The last 100 pages focus on Tendler’s life after her release from the hospital. There are chapters dedicated to her experience with Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), an intensive group therapy, which are generally well-written and demystify the process. However, these chapters are interspersed with Tendler’s post-divorce dating experiences, which are significantly lower quality.
Tendler describes pretty terrible but mostly unremarkable dates that she attempts to analyze deeply but ends up sounding like cliche social media feminism. In a takeaway that feels irritatingly as-seen-on-Twitter, Tendler writes, “Instead of thinking, Will he want me?, I coax my inner monologue to a new option: Do I want him? This is a question I have never considered in any of my relationships.”
Tendler describes pretty terrible but mostly unremarkable dates that she attempts to analyze deeply but ends up sounding like cliche social media feminism.
Tendler’s chapter on her experience with in vitro fertilization (IVF) was a welcome break from uninventive commentary and a highlight of the entire memoir. She details the lack of support she felt from doctors, her anxieties about whether she was administering the medications correctly, and her fears about the success of her retrieval. By illustrating how challenging the process is through thorough writing, she makes it seem less daunting—she made it through the process herself.
The book ends with Tendler analyzing the report given by her doctors after her stay at the psychiatric facility. Most of her analysis of this report is interesting commentary on misogyny in the medical system and the lack of transparency between doctors and patients. Other commentary occasionally suffers from the same social media feminism as her post-divorce dating chapters, and some comes across as closed-minded.
In one instance, Tendler writes about leaving a harmful therapist. For the most part, it seems true that Tendler made logical decisions to stay with her therapist as long as she did, and she explains her reasoning well. What feels questionable and rather forced is her gendered explanation. “My gendered life experience causes me to second-guess myself before questioning the figure of authority,” she writes.
While Tendler succeeds in opening up about her experiences seeking help for mental illness, her cultural commentary throughout her memoir is unoriginal, lacks nuance, and is frankly unnecessary.
