When I told a friend I was reading Anna Marie Tendler’s new memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy, she furrowed her brows and asked, “Should I know who that is?”
“John Mulaney’s ex-wife,” I reminded her. This is how most people know Tendler’s name and story.
Tendler didn’t want to write a divorce memoir; she originally pitched a photo book to Simon & Schuster that would collect the haunting photographs she regularly posts on her Instagram and has exhibited in art shows. But a memoir published two years after her very public separation from nice guy-turned-complicated guy John Mulaney is likely more lucrative than a visual art project, so that is probably how Men Have Called Her Crazy came to exist. Tendler claims this book is a long-overdue assertion of her own self-authored subjectivity. Unfortunately, what she wrote is a memoir that reinforces her position as an accessory to the men who have loved and hurt her.
Mulaney isn’t mentioned by name in the memoir—either a deliberate choice by Tendler or the result of a divorce NDA— but his shadow looms over the whole thing in passing mentions of a failing marriage and in details that are familiar if you’ve watched Mulaney’s standup. Tendler existed in the public consciousness for years as John Mulaney’s Wife. “She is a dynamite, five-foot Jewish bitch and she’s the best,” Mulaney said to applause in his 2018 Netflix special Kid Gorgeous.
When news of their divorce and Mulaney’s subsequent partnership with a pregnant Olivia Munn broke in 2021, people on the internet freaked out. Tendler became a sort of patron saint for the modern jilted woman; under one June 2021 Instagram post captioned “God, It’s Brutal Out Here,” commenters fawned in solidarity, saying things like “this i feel this i understand,” “A mood tbh,” and “You inspire me to keep going.” In documenting her side of the divorce, she became an avatar for suffering women married to emotionally stunted men.
For whatever reason, Tendler has decided to talk around Mulaney, rather than provide all the gory details many readers were surely hoping to find. Instead, she tells the story of how she came to be a person whose public persona was defined by her marriage and then her divorce. The memoir is a woven dual timeline: One chronicles a two-week stay in a psychiatric hospital in early 2021, while the other pops in and out of vignettes of her formative romantic experiences, from the jock senior who made out with her when she was a freshman to the multimillionaire ex-boyfriend who had her cut his hair for free for months to repay him back for the half of a makeup class tuition he fronted. She admits that she has always defined herself in relation to the men around her, that as a teenager, she “cemented [her] role in relationships as a pleaser, a convincer, a girl who, well into adulthood, would contort and conform to the desires of a man, overlooking his easy dismissal, and dampening her self-worth, all to be loved.”
She also repeatedly says she hates and distrusts men, even the “good” ones, because “plenty of nice and kind men have deeply misogynistic points of view … you think just being nice and kind solves the problem of gender equality?” She does not have to mention Mulaney for the reader to draw conclusions about the dynamics of their relationship.
Tendler softens this stance somewhat over the course of the book, but still spends most of the last chapter laying out an argument against the psychiatric report she received from the hospital, which noted her distrust for and hatred of men. “In this assessment I see a portrait of myself drawn by a straight, white, cisgendered man; the standard against which modern psychology measures all else.” Even at the end of this book-length exploration of her sovereignty under the patriarchy, she reiterates the anger and frustration that started the narrative. Male and female are sorted into tidy categories—good and bad, right and wrong, gaslighter and gaslit—that morally flattens what are invariably complex relationships between multifaceted humans, who possess the power to both oppress and be oppressed by the racialized, gender, sexualized, and classed contexts in which they exist.
This is the risk Tendler takes by staking her statement of selfhood on a product that is fundamentally derivative of her divorce. She doesn’t want to be defined by her relationships with men, yet in her writerly debut, she situates herself as girlfriend, wife, and female patient. It’s a tension within the book that comes up in somewhat indulgent asides showing off her knowledge about art, design, and textiles; she interrupts the flow of her psychological evaluations in the hospital for a digression about historically accurate settees and how she approached the design of her Connecticut farmhouse. These digressions have the effect of screaming out to the reader, I KNOW THINGS, see what’s in MY mind, I ALSO contain multitudes! The interjections are clunky and transparent, but also serve as a reminder that Tendler’s primary medium as an artist is visual.
In writing this memoir, Tendler takes on the challenge of subverting the madwoman-in-the-attic archetype, the crazy ex-wife who has existed in culture as long as heterosexual relationships have been documented. In Hebrew mythology, Adam’s first wife, Lilith, refused to subjugate herself to him and became a monster woman infamous for and trapped by her cruelty and coldness. The scorned madwoman reverberates through culture and appears in fiction, as in the legend of Bluebeard, the novels Jane Eyre and Rebecca, as well as in celebrity narratives like Sylvia Plath, Britney Spears, and even Olivia Rodrigo, who made her pop debut on the back of a messy breakup and love triangle with Joshua Bassett and Sabrina Carpenter.
In twining the story of her mental health crisis with an exploration of her subjugation, Tendler makes explicit the literally maddening impact of living within patriarchy; as Taylor Swift says in her song “Mad Woman,” “Every time you call me crazy/I get more crazy/What about that?” The memoir is a statement of her autonomy and subjectivity, a desperate clawing back to stability after being upended by the events readers know happened in the months leading up to her hospitalization: Mulaney’s relapse, intervention, and enrollment in rehab, and Tendler’s own descent into depression, anxiety, disordered eating, and self-harm. But the fact remains that this statement of autonomy exists in a commercial product that was packaged and sold to capitalize on the publicity of those crises. By capitalizing on the interest in her divorce, Tendler is building a career for herself, but she is also trapping herself in the cage she says she wants to escape.
The book is actually more successful when she isn’t writing about men at all. Tendler spends a few chapters on Petunia, a French bulldog she pushes around the city in a stroller. Most readers will already know about Petunia and the stroller from Mulaney’s standup, but Tendler spends the time on her own relationship with the dog, who died while she was writing this book. A scene of Tendler carrying Petunia around her house, recounting memories together before her euthanasia, is tender and sincere and has stayed with me. In the days after Petunia’s death, Tendler says she can still feel her presence, and a healer tells her Petunia is afraid to leave her alone. She speaks to Petunia’s spirit. “I promise Petunia that I am okay and that I will be okay without her. I tell her how grateful I am to her for staying with me—for guarding me—until I was strong enough to survive without her,” she writes.
Petunia was a difficult dog with myriad health issues, she said, who inherited the terrier instinct of resource guarding. Whenever Tendler dropped something on the floor, Petunia would claim that thing—pens, remote controls, shoes— as her own, and guard it jealously. Tendler would begin a long routine of coaxing Petunia to let the item go with treats. Tendler says that Petunia told her (through an animal communicator) that she takes things she’s not supposed to have, but she never destroys them. “Petunia’s objective was not to chew, rip, or destroy; her objective was merely to have a little treasure of her own.” Men Have Called Her Crazy, in its assertions of autonomy, its refusal to engage directly with the buzziest parts of her story—in its mere existence—reads like Tendler’s attempt to have a little treasure of her own, too. Ultimately it’s hard to fault her for wanting that.
