A Memoir About Recovering From Men
7 min read
For a large part of her adult life, Anna Marie Tendler was best known as a character in someone else’s bit. She recurred throughout the stand-up routines of her ex-husband, the comedian and former Saturday Night Live writer John Mulaney, as a loving but sharp-edged caricature: a “dynamite 5-foot Jewish bitch,” the “Alpha” of the household, the person who planned their wedding and reputedly harassed Mulaney until he committed to her. In a 2018 episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Jerry Seinfeld and Mulaney go rug shopping, supposedly at Tendler’s instruction, and Seinfeld’s disapprobation at being sent on an errand by someone’s wife cuts through the segment. “Do you like doing this?” he asks Mulaney in disbelief. The subtext throughout is that Tendler is a harridan, a domineering scold. Gazing at a runner with clashing colors, Seinfeld remarks, “She’s gonna hit you with a rolling pin when you show her that.” When Tendler finally appears at the end, smiling bashfully and rejecting the rug the pair chose, Seinfeld shrugs as if to say, See?
Tendler was the wife of a culturally beloved Wife Guy, until she wasn’t. During the coronavirus pandemic, she writes in her new memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy, it became clear that her marriage was “falling apart”; late in 2020, Mulaney went to rehab for substance abuse—a period he later explored in his Netflix special Baby J. Tendler’s book begins a few weeks later, at the start of 2021, when, after an intense period of self-harm and suicidal ideation, she was admitted to a psychiatric facility. Her one proviso, as she told her therapist ahead of her arrival, was that she adamantly refused to be around men. Men Have Called Her Crazy is a story about recovery, and Tendler seems to see men as one of her foremost afflictions. She indicts men who lie to women “while telling them they are crazy or overreacting,” men without “any moral compass pertaining to underage girls,” men who goad women into the same “hysterical” state that they “twist back in your direction as evidence of your unfounded lunacy.” In mordant, frank prose, she weaves interludes from her past—the musician who took her virginity when she was 17, the wealthy boyfriend who offered to pay her to clean his Hamptons rental—into the account of her psychological breakdown.
But to me, Men Have Called Her Crazy also reads like a project of self-definition. When you’re most familiar to others through the lens of someone’s schtick, what do you do when you’re suddenly the main act? Given this context, it feels almost ungracious to note what’s not in the book, yet the absence of key years and chapters of Tendler’s life feels notable. When her book was first announced, some assumed it would be a scorched-earth tell-all. Instead, Mulaney is all but absent. Tendler explicitly refers to her marriage only a handful of times—for instance, when she mentions her reliance on her husband’s income or relocating to Los Angeles for his job. Otherwise, she writes around him. We can only speculate why, but the resulting book at least appears to have the uncanny shape of a 21st-century art form: the NDA memoir.
In the first two-thirds of the book, the gaps are less noticeable. From the beginning, Tendler is eloquent and spry as she recounts her arrival at the psychiatric facility, including her attempts to make the admitting doctor laugh even as she describes her desire to die, on a scale of one to 10, as “eleven.” Her arms and thighs bear bandages covering wounds she’s made herself, with scissors. Emaciated and shivering, she sleeps in a leopard-print sweatsuit, although she’s woken every two hours by an employee with a flashlight who checks that she’s still breathing. “The whole situation feels very Girl, Interrupted,” she writes, “but there is no hot male orderly, and, as far as I can tell, none of the girls are stashing rotisserie chickens under their beds.” She’s assessed by multiple doctors, given Rorschach tests and math problems, and participates in group sessions and horticulture therapy. Her internal monologue at times is almost comically hostile: “I hate him. I hate him so much … Words cannot describe the antipathy I have for this conversation,” she thinks, after someone comments on her outfit. But she’s also desperate to succeed at the mission of healing herself and, like any good Millennial perfectionist, painfully eager to please.
Therapy is a necessarily retrospective process and gels well with the thrust of Tendler’s book, whose title suggests a single source for her pain. As she proceeds with her stay, she recalls men from her past, some more carefully sketched than others. As a freshman in high school, she encounters a classmate who critiques her clothing, arrives at her house uninvited, jams his crotch against hers, and then stands her up at the mall. At 16, she’s noticed by the 28-year-old musician who eventually takes her virginity (after which he checks the condom for holes). When she’s a 21-year-old trainee hairdresser, broke and living in Queens, she starts dating a wealthy man who persuades her to quit her job and cut his hair so he can tell his snobby friends that she has her own business. “It’s annoying you have to work on Saturdays anyway,” he tells her. “Once the summer comes, I want you to be able to come to the Hamptons when I invite you.”
These stories are painful but not entirely unusual for Millennial women, and none seems to be responsible for where Tendler finds herself at 35: emotionally devastated, physically breaking down, and disinterested, at best, in living. This is where the book’s uneven structure starts to falter—there are giant pieces of her story that she doesn’t, or possibly can’t, reveal, and their absence risks turning her writing into negative space, when it should be front and center. Without a defined target, her professed loathing of men also starts to feel overstated. There are moments when Tendler seems to allude to her marriage—for instance, when she comments on how inequities of wealth and power between two people can coalesce “into an insidious dynamic where the person with less remains submissive and pliable to the will of one with more.” She recalls writing a suicide note sometime before her psychiatric stay, absurdly, after “wearing a very sexy dress to a party and receiving no compliments about how hot I looked”—a symptom of a larger frustration with the fact that no one close to her seemed to be noticing her “mental and physical decline” or paying attention to her at all. But she leaves unsaid how that feeling of neglect and invisibility might have been aggravated by her default public role: the silent spouse who’s also a punch line.
No one knows what really goes on inside a marriage, with the exception of the people within it. And no one who’s not famous can imagine what it’s like to inhabit the hothouse of the public gaze, with its parasocial relationships and prurient curiosity and constant projection. Mulaney himself has poked at the strangeness of finding himself newly unpopular, with a reputation that’s “different” post-rehab and post-divorce. “Likability is a jail,” he sings, coyly, on Baby J. But it’s also a crucial tenet of modern celebrity. “If I tell the story, I control the version,” Nora Ephron wrote in Heartburn, a fictionalized version of her own divorce. What makes me so uneasy about even the idea of non-disparagement clauses and nondisclosure agreements in this kind of case is that they enshrine existing power dynamics for some while depriving others of their ability to claim their stories for themselves.
One consequence of focusing on men as a secondary subject is that Tendler ends up neglecting aspects of herself: the huge following she drew on Tumblr in the 2000s, her awakening as an artist after her divorce. In 2021, after she left the psychiatric facility, she began work on a set of ghostly, ethereal self-portraits: a woman alone in her moodily decorated Victorian home, performing different ranges of emotional expression. The series is called Rooms in the First House, a reference, she notes on her website, to the astrological “house of self.” In her book, she explains that she started making photographs because “I needed to remind myself that I still existed.” In one image, she sits hunched over a dining table set for two, staring at the void at the other end. In another, she lights candles as she sits in front of an open book, the center of a makeshift altar strewn with roses and antlers. The photographs are witchy and haunting, layered with fury, melodrama, and grief. They radiate a distinct vision, filled with uncertainty but also—unchecked, unmediated—power.
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