The Worst Sect of People

Sheila McClear reviews “Men Have Called Her Crazy,” a supposed tell-all memoir by Anna Marie Tendler.

By Sheila McClearAugust 17, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• Nonfiction

• Biography & Autobiography

• Gender & Sexuality

AT THE OUTSET of Men Have Called Her Crazy, Anna Marie Tendler is in bad shape. She has struggled for varying lengths of time with suicidal thoughts, cutting, and disordered eating. During her intake interview at the psychiatric facility she checks herself into for a weeklong evaluation during the pandemic, she reveals that she has thought about taking her own life within the past 48 hours, rates her “desire to die” as an “eleven” on a scale from one to 10, and admits that she has written a suicide note before (she ripped this up, finding her words self-pitying and “embarrassing”).

“All I feel is anger that I’m thirty-five and back to cutting myself, and that my life feels like a series of bad mistakes,” she writes, of her decision to check herself in.

There has been substantial prepublication buzz around Tendler’s memoir. Many have wondered if—perhaps even hoped—the book would offer a tell-all about life with its author’s famous ex-husband, the comedian John Mulaney. Tabloids have explicitly suggested it would. Mulaney, now married to the actress Olivia Munn, is known for affectionately including Tendler in his comedy bits during their marriage (sample line from Mulaney’s 2015 Netflix special, The Comeback Kid: “She’s a bossy little Jew, but she takes care of you”), as well as for detailing his struggles with substance abuse (chronicled in his latest special, 2023’s Baby J). More recently, he’s known for this role in the couple’s separation, which was announced in May 2021 and provided fodder for outcry among fans who had grown parasocially attached to the pair.

Yet those looking for celebrity-sized gossip can turn back to the shelf. Tendler never refers to Mulaney by name and describes virtually nothing of their time together—there are only a few necessary points where the narrative makes it necessary for her to mention “my husband,” “my marriage,” and later, “my divorce.”

It takes a decisive writer to leave a husband of eight years out of her memoir. Whether this is an act of vengeance, indifference, or a non-disparagement clause is unclear. In any event, far more ink is spilled on the life and death of her beloved French bulldog Petunia, who she used to wheel around New York City in a baby carriage.

Mulaney aside, Tendler’s book grapples with two competing narratives. On one hand, this memoir reads as written for and about the author herself, concerned primarily with her emotional recovery. However, the laser-like intensity with which she beams in on the lifetime of mistreatment she’s received from various “fucking men” inevitably detracts from that project. This is too bad: the stories and decisions Tendler collects during times of relative independence, even singledom are much richer and more interesting than her hyperdetailed descriptions of past relationships, starting in her high school days and ending with various unsuccessful and fairly insignificant mini-relationships with men she met on dating apps after her hospitalization.

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The book’s title covers a lot of ground. Men have called Tendler crazy, they’ve driven Tendler crazy, and they have treated her as if she was crazy—usually after the first blush of emotionality. And then there’s the reality of being in a psychiatric hospital. But does that mean she’s “crazy,” or just an individual undergoing a period of crisis?

At the hospital, Tendler’s revulsion with men is so pronounced that she goes so far as to request to stay in one of the all-female houses on campus. “I absolutely refuse to be around men,” she writes. “I don’t even want to look at them,” she informs the therapist who referred her there; later, she tells a different doctor that she’s “grown increasingly angry at men’s mere existence.”

Sandwiched between these scenes from her hospital stay are memories. While these jump around in time, including to her posthospital success as an artist after a lifetime of struggling creatively, they offer, namely, a comprehensive history of men, the ones who have either called or driven her crazy, or both. If nothing else, the book provides a litany of problematic boyfriends and lovers.

Tendler’s early romantic experiences were mostly negative, and she catalogs every slight as though recounting events to a psychological professional, employing a careful, sometimes overexplanatory writing style. Tendler may not always be a particularly artful writer, but she’s an unwaveringly thorough one: “I have a sort of photographic memory for the ways men have asserted their power over me, the ways they have treated me poorly, and the ways I have fought to be equal or conversely sublimated myself to keep peace,” she explains. True to her word, she assembles a kind of scrapbook. Freshman year, there’s Ethan, a high school senior and jock whom Tendler seems lukewarm about, yet is already savvy enough to understand that his popularity could boost her reputation at school. Sophomore year, it’s Julian, who sends elaborate emails but doesn’t seem to want to date her publicly.

The list goes on. Perhaps most notable among the bad men is a touring musician who Tendler meets when she’s 16. He’s 29 and tells her she’s mature for her age—exactly what a precocious teenager longs to hear. A few months and one birthday later, she visits him at his home in Los Angeles. When they sleep together, it’s her first time. The experience is unmemorable. Still, Tendler recognizes her newfound status as a “Lolita,” which her teenage self interprets as being “powerful” and “in control.” After graduating from high school, she moves in with the musiscian for a year. He is rarely home—always on tour—and she feels trapped, eventually making her way back to New York. By the time of her institutionalization, she admits to a sense of increasing unease about that relationship. “I think it’s super odd that a twenty-nine-year-old man would have sex with a seventeen-year-old, even if it was consensual,” she tells a female social worker, whom she trusts more than the doctors simply because she is a woman.

Another hit—well, miss—from her past is the affable but clueless Theo, a recently minted internet millionaire. (It’s safe to say that “Theo” is a stand-in for Ricky Van Veen, an internet entrepreneur who made millions from the sale of CollegeHumor, the website he co-founded, when a controlling stake was sold to IAC in 2006.) She quickly realizes that the combination of being rich and being a man created, in her experience, “perhaps the worst sect of people.” Still, she sticks with the relationship until he betrays her by continuing a relationship with a mean-spirited female friend who repeatedly characterizes Tendler as a money-grubber. For his part, Theo appears blind to the effect that his money, and Tendler’s lack of it, would have on the balance of their relationship. At one point, when Tendler tells him that she has to stay in the city and work that summer—you know, instead of accompanying him to the Hamptons every weekend—Theo suggests in all earnestness that she can solve that particular financial problem by serving as the cleaner for his shared vacation rental house. “All of us renting the house can pay you to clean!” he enthuses. (The owners of the Hamptons house decline his offer to enlist his girlfriend to clean, preferring to stick with the professional cleaners they had used for years.)

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If Tendler’s recitation of boys, man-children, and, eventually, grown men becomes tedious, it’s because, aside from a few ludicrous one-offs, her experiences are relatively common. Evidently, even when it comes to celebrities, the bottom line doesn’t budge—a significant number of men have always treated women carelessly and badly. And maybe that’s the point. Recounting these stories illuminates, over and over again, the author’s default reaction to male attention: minimizing, contracting, and contorting herself in order to please. Whether or not the book appears all that aware of it, for readers, the dynamic registers as clear—this pattern creates at least one part of the emotional hell in which Tendler has found herself.

Frustratingly, even with the book’s Mulaney-sized omissions, an extroardinary amount of page space remains devoted to the shortcomings of subpar guys. Yet Tendler is the one who compels, not the men—and her memoir is most engaging when she writes about herself. Wildly creative, she recounts a life of searching for ways to express herself: first through ballet, then a stint at the Vidal Sassoon Academy for cosmetology after high school (she completes the program but fails the state board exam), then photography and psychology classes at the New School (she drops out after a year, only to complete her degree later). After that, she works as a shampoo girl in a salon, makes a half-hearted attempt at another degree in art education, and “cut[s] hair illegally,” an undertaking encouraged by boyfriend Theo so she could be her own boss and quit the salon. It’s here that the author’s life and mine intersect, albeit incredibly briefly: around 2008, having heard through Van Veen’s network that his girlfriend did hair on the side, I found myself in his apartment with Tendler, who gave me a haircut in a one-off appointment.

Tendler reinvents herself as a makeup artist, and her popular beauty-oriented Tumblr leads to a gig as the host of a web show involving makeup tips and ghost stories—yes, you read that right—for the website Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls. Next, she teaches herself to create ornate Victorian lampshades after buying “an instructional DVD off Etsy, recorded from a VHS made in 1992.” The lampshades are made available to her social network and a business is born. For readers paying attention to the woman behind the breakups, such creative leaps—and their subsequent success—shouldn’t come as a surprise. When we first encounter Tendler during her hospital stay in the winter of 2021, she’s in the middle of earning a master’s degree in costume studies at New York University, which she hopes might lead to a career in museum work. She has just finished a yearlong position working for a textile conservator. She has also completed an art project of her own—redecorating her postdivorce Connecticut house in obsessive, exquisite period detail, turning it into “a sort of haunted Victorian dollhouse.” Both emotionally and visually, Tendler is a maximalist.

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At the hospital, Tendler undergoes a battery of psychological testing, which ranges from the standard Rorschach test (she sees a lot of vaginas) to solving math problems in her head and arranging sets of colored blocks. The results characterize her as “highly conscientious” and imaginative. They also suggest that she’s introverted and neurotic. When asked what she has to live for, she can only list her loyal French bulldog, Petunia.

Life in a psych hospital is typically far from exciting. A high point is the tenderness she feels towards the other female patients with whom she shares a group house. Tendler has cultivated a close-knit, long-term group of girlfriends outside of the hospital, and it’s clear from her descriptions of the other women patients that she values female relationships. There’s Caitlyn, an 18-year-old volleyball player; Mary, whose dream is to become a lawyer; and Shawn, who practices the violin in her room. The women’s shared routine in the daily psych-hospital tedium, punctuated by art therapy and plant therapy, is part of the healing process. Sequestered from the real world together, the little things matter: a comforting taste of the prepackaged hot chocolate from the hospital dining room becomes—if not something to live for—a small, good delight.

After leaving the hospital, Tendler begins taking the haunting, witchy, and melancholy self-portraits she is now known for (one of which serves as the cover of her book), using her magnificently decorated house as a backdrop. After being asked to exhibit at the Other Art Fair, a hub for emerging artists, she finds success in fine art photography. (These days, prints for her photographs on her website start at $5,000.) She also jumps back into dating, where men continue to let her down, and the list picks back up.

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It’s only while finishing her memoir, over two years after leaving the hospital, that Tendler finally decides to read the final conclusions that the doctors came to in a report. There are some surprises in it, such as the doctors’ interpretation of her anger toward men to actually be anger toward her mother or other maternal figures. Tendler argues that her anger is, in fact, “largely directed at myself, or at larger social structures I find personally oppressive—misogyny, patriarchy, and sexism.” She takes issue with how she has been interpreted by the medical professionals, and goes so far as to wonder if male doctors are even capable of assessing a woman accurately:

From my view, the field of psychology was developed by white men using white men as the baseline standard for behavior and sanity. Centuries of conditioning has taught them, and us as a society, that when a woman expresses anger, paranoia, fear, anxiety, depression, or even intuition, they might be crazy. Years of my own experiences with men have taught me they struggle to see women as autonomous creatures with complicated, interesting, rich inner lives. Usually, they see us only in relation to themselves.

Many people, including myself, could argue that she is not wrong in her assessments. Yet one might also find themselves wishing Tendler had come to some sort of détente with the male sex by the end of the book. While in many ways this book is a rejection of men—at least, the ones who lack empathy and maturity, the ones who have called her crazy—that rejection is peformed through an overfocused lens, a camera whose frame is angled decidedly away from personal accountability.

Men Have Called Her Crazy is no Girl, Interrupted—it reaches wider, beyond the institution. It’s also messier. After the hospital and the subsequent “work” done in therapy, Tendler writes that she is now a “sturdy person” who is more capable of dealing with overwhelming emotions. And, when it comes to her emotional struggles, Tendler appears to have written her way out of—or at least engaged in honest conversation with—certain darknesses. But memoirs rarely wrap themselves up into neat packages. When it comes to men, Tendler still very much reads as a work in progress. Her relationship with the gender as a whole is unresolved—she has ideological, structural problems with men and their actions yet she longs to connect with them on a human level. Her frustration is laid bare when she admits that she has no such desire to do away with men completely. She freezes her eggs in case she changes her mind about wanting children, even as she tells a date that parenting a son would be “difficult” for her. Tendler addresses this tension in the final chapter: “I don’t hate men,” she writes. “I still want to fuck them. I still want to love them.”

The readers can only hope that, using her hard-won resiliency, she will continue that very human quest: wanting and searching for a person to love—even if that person happens to be a man—whose capacity for respect and equality matches her own.