Anna Marie Tendler in 2022. “I wrote this book for other women,” she says of her new novel Men Have Called Her Crazy. Photo / Getty Images
Anna Marie Tendler in 2022. “I wrote this book for other women,” she says of her new novel Men Have Called Her Crazy. Photo / Getty Images
The artist was married to a famous comedian with a circle of celebrity friends, but then her husband left — and she checked into a psychiatric hospital. Now, she’s written summer’s most talked-about memoir.
‘On a beautiful and perfect day, I married a beautiful and perfect woman. I wish Icould live it over and over again.” That’s how John Mulaney described his wedding to the artist Anna Marie Tendler. The Emmy award-winning Saturday Night Live comedian, who more recently played Carmy’s cousin’s boyfriend, Stevie, in The Bear, and his girlfriend of four years had a 1920s-inspired wedding among the trees in the Catskills. The American comedian Dan Levy performed the ceremony, and other friends including Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers toasted the couple. The bride wore a bejewelled Jenny Packham dress, their French bulldog, Petunia, had a flower crown made by Tendler and the pictures went viral on Instagram, TikTok and wedding Pinterest boards. The honeymoon period seemed to last for years. Mulaney referred lovingly to Tendler in his sets and she did his make-up for his shows.
That wedding was in 2014. Seven years later, Tendler checked into a psychiatric hospital. She was 35, in the middle of her split from Mulaney and her therapist had referred her because she was at high risk of suicide — self-harming and not eating. “Going to the hospital saved my life,” she says now, smiling as she sits in her Connecticut home in an oversized white New Balance T-shirt and a thin gold necklace, her brown hair in a messy topknot. She gladly gave up her phone, wallet and computer and surrendered to an intense therapy programme.
Mulaney made a series of seismic public announcements about the unravelling of their marriage. He talked about having sought treatment for alcohol and cocaine addictions, and then in May 2021 filed for divorce. That September he said that he and his new girlfriend, the actress Olivia Munn (best known for the Aaron Sorkin drama The Newsroom), were expecting a baby, who was born in November, six months after Tendler and Mulaney’s divorce was announced. At the time, Tendler said: “Everything that has transpired has been totally shocking and I think surreal. In a way, I feel like it can only go up from here, because I reached the depth of where I could go.”
Now, at the age of 39, Tendler has written a memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy. She describes it as “a story about mental health, about being a woman, about family. And finally, about the endless source of my heartbreak and rage — men.”
It begins in the psychiatric hospital and flashes back to her early relationships: from Sam, a 28-year-old in a band to whom she lost her virginity aged 17 and who collected pornographic photos of other women, to Theo, who made millions from the dotcom boom and told her she was paranoid for thinking he was spending a lot of time with his friend Rachel, only for Tendler to learn that he was indeed cheating on her.
Mulaney is conspicuously absent from the memoir. “I didn’t want to turn it into a book about divorce,” she says in a defiant tone. Her own parents divorced when she was 16. “There are amazing memoirs about that already, Heartburn [by Nora Ephron] and Aftermath by Rachel Cusk. I don’t have anything to add to that. Also, I never like doing what people expect. I’ve had so many relationships over the course of my life so I chose to write those stories.” Is she in touch with Mulaney? She stiffens. “I’m not going to answer that.”
Tendler with her husband at the time, John Mulaney, in 2018. Photo / Getty Images
When she came out of hospital, Tendler left New York, where she’d been living for the past 17 years and moved to Connecticut, where she grew up. Even when she was married to Mulaney and mixing in celebrity circles, “it was a world I always felt very much on the outside of”. But moving away was still hard. “There is the feeling that if you leave New York you have failed in some way, you can’t hack it,” she says. “But I was craving a life that was quieter, slower.” She tells me about taking up running in the countryside (she did the Brooklyn Half Marathon), about seeing foxes, deer and a bobcat every day and about the black bear who invaded her yard recently (it wasn’t scary, “I loved it”).
She also spent US$12,000 ($20,000) on freezing her eggs. In her memoir, she writes eloquently about her uncertainty about whether to have children (“I’ve never woken up at 8am and thought I’d love to take a kid to soccer practice right now!” she says), and then, when she turned 36, the sudden worry that “time was running out” to decide. This was compounded by the peer pressure of all her friends having children and her fearing she was missing out on the chance to be in their special club and have a bond with a child.
Tendler is relieved to be approaching 40. “I found my thirties very hard,” she says. “There’s so much pressure to figure out what you’re doing with your life and your career as you watch everyone else sort it out. You’re supposed to be grown up but my thirties were a mess. Now I feel less pressure.”
Six months after coming out of hospital, she started dating again. At first, she told men everything about her past. “I felt like I had to tell people what had happened to me right away because I felt defined by it,” she says. “And there are aspects of my life that are googleable and I worried about people finding things out without hearing it from me first. As a woman, I look up everyone I go on a date with but surprisingly men don’t — which speaks to a sexism in the world. Women have to look up who they’re going out with because they want to make sure they are safe and men don’t have to worry about that.”
But as time went on, she “cared less” about what people found on the internet. She’s been going out with her current boyfriend for seven months — he works for a running shoe company — and when they got together she just told him she was close to finishing a book and he should read the first chapter. He’s now read the whole book and is supportive. She laughs as one of her black cats interrupts us, clambering on to her lap.
On the sofa behind her is a cushion embroidered with the face of her dog, Petunia, who died in 2023, sending her into despair. She doesn’t think she will get another dog, “Petunia is not replaceable”, but she does now have three cats, Chimney, Moon and Butter, and says: “I needed an animal that was low maintenance and it’s been nice to lean into my life as a cat lady.”
Men Have Called Her Crazy by Anna Marie Tendler.
Writing the book, she was influenced by the memoir writer Melissa Febos, who is interested in what comes after trauma rather than focusing on the gory details. Tendler writes movingly about being bullied at school; how, at 13, finding out that she wasn’t good enough to fulfil her dream of becoming a professional ballerina “crushed me, stripped me of my identity”; and her mother’s anger when Tendler’s father quickly found a new relationship after the split. But the way she recounts how she self-harmed to cope is pared back. “I want people who have struggled with mental health to be able to read it and not be hugely triggered,” she says.
There’s a theme in the book of men lying to women and telling them they are overreacting for being angry. It was cathartic to write, she says: “When I went back and wrote about Sam [who was 11 years older than her and undermined her], it was important for me to hold him a bit more accountable than I did then.”
Tendler thinks women are talking about their feelings and relationships more now, particularly on TikTok. “There’s a solidarity and it makes you feel less alone. It helps you use your anger for something constructive.”
Who is the book for, should men read it? “I would love it if men read it,” she says. “I don’t know that a lot of them will.” Most of all, she says, “I wrote this book for other women.”
Men Have Called Her Crazy (Bonnier Book UK) is available in New Zealand on August 27.
