Anna Marie Tendler Is Still Not Okay

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | August 15, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | August 15, 2024 |

Anna Marie Tendler is the ex-wife (and woman scorned, depending on who you ask) of comedian John Mulaney. The two announced their divorce in 2020 and in 2021 Mulaney welcomed his first child with now-wife Olivia Munn. Much drama and gossip about cheating and messy breakups ensued. Then, earlier this year, Tendler announced her debut memoir Men Have Called Her Crazy, a book she said she’d been writing for two years, about “mental health; about being a woman; about family. And finally, about the endless source of my heartbreak and rage—men.”

Men Have Called Her Crazy finally came out on Tuesday, and even though her most famous ex isn’t mentioned “nor is he even alluded to,” it opens in 2021, the year Tendler and Mulaney split, when Tendler “checked herself into a psychiatric hospital following a year of anxiety, depression, and self-harm.” (Variety)

The book, and the conversations she has about it, are steeped in that same anxiety and depression. “I wish I could tell you it was gonna get better in 10 years,” Tendler said to her interviewer from Variety, a woman in her mid-20s. “I just generally, as a person, find the day-to-day challenging—emotionally and mentally.”

Now 39, she admits, “It has been my experience that as I’ve gotten older, life has not gotten easier. But it’s gotten richer and more exciting and fruitful … I guess …”

Yikes. In the MFA program (yes, I’m one of those silly people with a silly, useless degree—and look at me now!), where I studied memoir and personal essay, we were taught not to write about experiences we were still so close to emotionally that we couldn’t write them without that same initial, heightened emotion because feeling something like it happened yesterday won’t lead to good writing. Distance is required to be able to see the full picture.

Tendler, it seems, is actively refuting this, or intentionally challenging it, I can’t tell yet. The latter could be interesting; the former will just sound sad. I suspect that she wrote this memoir for herself, like a real-time therapy session where she’s both provider and client. She says otherwise:

“I definitely wrote it for women. I hope men read it, too. I wanted to write something that was for women that are kind of angry, but also were living in the world.”

I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, but I like memoirs that make meaning out of everyday experiences, rather than thinly-veiled diary entries published for the sake of relatability. And, well…

“There was so much that happened in my life that maybe someone didn’t have this exact experience, but if I’m experiencing the same ones, over and over and over again, that means that there are a lot of other women who are as well.”

That’s nice. But is it anything new? It was Carrie Fisher who said, “Take your broken heart, make it into art.” But even she waited a while.