Reading Hollywood: Men Have Called Her Crazy by Anne Marie Tendler

There’s a Mulaney-sized hole at the centre of this memoir of mental illness and patriarchy.

In early 2021, popular artist Anna Marie Tendler checked herself into a psychiatric hospital following a year of crippling anxiety, depression and self-harm. Over two weeks, she underwent myriad psychological tests, participated in numerous therapy sessions, connected with fellow patients and experienced profound breakthroughs, such as when a doctor noted, “There is a you inside that feels invisible to those looking at you from the outside.”

In Men Have Called Her Crazy, Tendler recounts her hospital experience as well as pivotal moments in her life that preceded and followed. As the title suggests, many of these moments are impacted by men: unrequited love in high school; the twenty-eight-year-old she lost her virginity to when she was sixteen; the frustrations and absurdities of dating in her mid-thirties; and her decision to freeze her eggs as all her friends were starting families.

This stunning literary self-portrait examines the unreasonable expectations and pressures women face in the 21st century. Yet overwhelming and despairing as that can feel, Tendler ultimately offers a message hope. Early in her stay in the hospital, she says, “My wish for myself is that one day I’ll reach a place where I can face hardship without trying to destroy myself.” By the end of the book, she fulfills that wish.

John Mulaney is never named in his ex-wife’s memoir. Anne Marie Tendler’s Men Have Called Her Crazy makes extremely sporadic references to her “ex-husband” but those hoping for a scandalous tell-all about the divorce that inspired an online parasocial tizzy will be disappointed. It’s the horse loose in the hospital that makes reading the book a curious experience, one where its deliberately incomplete nature feels both nervy and maddening.

While the blurb for the book describes Tendler as a “popular artist”, it’s tough to deny that she got this memoir published because a hell of a lot of terminally online people, myself included, became deeply fascinated by her status as an ex-wife to a celebrity. When John Mulaney went to rehab, announced his split from Tendler, then quickly had a baby with Olivia Munn, social media received a speedy lesson in the perils of fandom and projecting your desires onto a total stranger. Mulaney, one of my favourite stand-up comics, was seen to many as a platonic ideal of a straight white dude, a Wife Guy and a sharp wit who was approachable and adorkable. Never mind that a lot of the best jokes in his comedy specials were about him being a perennial f*ck-up with addiction issues: it was surprisingly easy to overlook those details in favour of embracing the tall man with feminine hips who loved his wife and talked about street smarts.

More so than many other celebrity divorces, fans seemed to take Mulaney and Tendler’s split personally, positioning him as the dream-ruiner who must have abandoned his loving wife in favour of a gorgeous actress. It’s a narrative that hangs overhead the release of Men Have Called Her Crazy, largely perpetrated by Team Anna, which has a habit of infantilizing a grown woman and acting as her unelected army in the name of girlbossing. It’s the Team Jen/Brad/Angelina battle for those who grew up watching the Stefon sketches on SNL, and it’s obviously unfair to everyone involved. Still, if Mulaney had Baby J, the stand-up special where he offered the unvarnished truth of being an addict who imploded his own life, Tendler gets her time to show the after-effects of her own mental anguish.

Men Have Called Her Crazy opens with Tendler entering a treatment facility after experiencing suicidal ideation. She’s returned to self-harming, a habit from her youth, and dealing with disordered eating. It’s the pandemic. If the timeline is accurate, Mulaney is in rehab as this goes on (Petunia, their adorably inbred French bulldog, is being babysat by Anna’s mother.) Anna is tired, traumatized, fearful of men, and at a new nadir. As she navigates the 30-day stay, complete with various forms of therapy and her fellow patients, she delves into her past, including her parents’ contentious divorce, her first experiences with mental illness, and the men who have left stains on her personal history.

The title refers to the many men who Tendler found herself involved with, almost always older than her and torn between fetishizing and infantilizing her: Grown men pushing 30 who date teens and lavish them with “praise” about how they’re so mature for their age; college dudes pawing at high schoolers then ghosting them; richer boyfriends who quietly wield their privilege over their less wealthy girlfriends without even knowing it’s a problem. Tendler offers the foundations of her life through this lens, but it comes up against two major problems, and only one of them is the glaring absence of Mulaney. We learn about how patriarchy has dented Tendler but get little sense of her outside of that. Her struggle to find an identity in life through work and education is highly relatable but only brought up to connect it to the male partners of each era. When she finds an artistic purpose through her current love of melancholic portraits and photography, it’s welcome but comes out of nowhere and says so little about her. It builds to this sense that Tendler thinks the men are more interesting than she is. They’re not. Actually, her experiences feel depressingly common and that would have been a keen angle for her to delve into. Another missed opportunity.

And of course, the absence of her ex makes a lot of this ring hollow. We’ve no idea if Tendler decided not to include Mulaney because of NDAs or her own narrative choices. I don’t blame her for not wanting to feed into a vulture-like hunger surrounding her life. Some of those people really need to chill (I remember seeing people tweet that Olivia Munn talking about her cancer diagnosis was intended to distract from Tendler’s book release and I truly believe those people will not see the light of heaven.) In one moment, during therapy, she admits to having been dependent on his income, which echoes a past relationship with a bored rich dude, but it’s left at that. Surely living with an addict who’s fallen off the wagon would be relevant to her ongoing issues and something she discussed regularly with patients and doctors? It means that there are gaps so large in Tendler’s own narrative that their absence is more compelling than what’s present. It doesn’t feel good to want to snatch at her experiences in this manner, but in this attempt to reclaim her story, the result is lesser than the sum of its parts, present or otherwise.

It’s a knotting contradiction at the centre of Men Have Called Her Crazy: a story that wants to be independent of the famous man in Tendler’s life but ends up being so concerned with the non-famous guys that her own arc flounders. She can’t tell the full story, or perhaps she simply doesn’t want to, but the scraps left aren’t as unique or compelling as they need to be in order to sustain a 300 page memoir. It’s an accidental embrace of that which Tendler hoped to reject.

After reading this, I returned to Baby J, Mulaney’s post-rehab and baby stand-up special wherein he poked fun at himself for ruining everyone’s glistening perceptions of him. It’s not a large part of the show but a crucial one. He gets it out of the way then reveals the weird, irritating, ugly, hilarious, and sad truth of being an addict. He doesn’t mention Tendler either, possibly for the same reasons she leaves him out of her story. Yet his narrative is fuller. His brutal self-assessment of falling off the wagon and the intervention that saved him works because it’s a subversion of that old image he inadvertently created for himself. Oh, you thought he was cute and safe? Here’s what really happened, and that’s just the stuff he’s willing to tell you! Imagine how much more embarrassing it got after the Rolex deal and the Pete Davidson calls and that super-award Seth Meyers appearance.

I feel sh*tty for continuing to push Mulaney and Tendler together in this manner. They’ve both moved on. Mulaney’s now married to Munn and has an adorable son. Tendler’s art is selling for huge prices and she’s a published author. Nobody wants to be wholly defined by their ex, even if that’s the thing that fans and the industry want to milk. Still, it’s tough to overlook how much Men Have Called Her Crazy needs Mulaney, and how his omission from Tendler’s own objective means the book cannot ever fully succeed.

Thanks for reading. I keep meaning to revive the book club but I get swamped under with other stuff. I’ll make it happen soon, I promise! For now, I shall also use Reading Hollywood to talk about celebrity books, industry publications, and so on. I own a lot of those.

If you’d like to read some other things I wrote, check out my reviews for Bad Monkey and Chimp Crazy on TheWrap (I’m on the primate beat, apparently.) I also wrote about the two failed Exorcist prequels for Inverse.