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On March 5th, 2024, a visual artist named Anna Marie Tendler announced on Instagram that she would be publishing a memoir called “Men Have Called Her Crazy.”

The comments quickly filled up with people saying things like:

The other person they are talking about is Anna Marie Tendler’s ex-husband, the comedian John Mulaney. But when her book came out, there was virtually nothing about her ex-husband in the book. Many reviewers and readers called the choice to exclude her famous ex-husband an artistic decision. They say, well, the book was a feminist piece of literature; maybe she didn’t want to be defined by her ex-husband and the drama surrounding their separation.
For example one Twitter user said:

Another Goodreads review by user Laura Donavon said: “there is SUCH POWER in Anna’s move to give [her ex-husband] so little air time in her pages. This is her story.” 

But I read the book, and I knew the backstory. And here’s my take: This was not a creative decision on the part of the author. This was a thorough NDA.

And I believe that there is extensive evidence in the text that she was silenced, not silent. And I also believe that her omission of her marriage was, unfortunately, the book’s fatal flaw, and the reason that people are calling this book “2014 Tumblr Feminism.”

 

First, to get us all caught up, here is the backstory.

The Backstory

John Mulaney, originally from Chicago, got his start as a writer on SNL in 2008. For example, he wrote the famous character Stefon along with Bill Hader. But he really rose to prominence in 2012 with the popular comedy special “New in Town,” sharing relatable stories about his American Irish Catholic upbringing, opening up about his sobriety, and making self-deprecating jokes. 

Throughout his comedy specials, “New in Town,” “The Comeback Kid,” and “Kid Gorgeous,” he made a lot of jokes about his, first, girlfriend, then wife, Anna Marie Tendler. 

He talked about his relationship with Tendler and their dog Petunia with a lot of love, which cultivated a public image of Mulaney as a relatable, loveable gentleman. He also made a point in his comedy pretty often that he did not want kids, and he joked about the pressure and expectations to have children. He posted frequently on social media about how much he loved and admired his wife.

His jokes kind of painted Tendler as really tough and difficult, and he portrayed himself as the passive, “Yes, honey,” husband. In an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, the whole joke with Jerry Seinfeld is that Mulaney is being forced against his will to buy carpets. One famous joke about Tendler is when Mulaney says that she told him before his comedy routine, “Just don’t tell everyone that I’m a bitch and that you don’t like me,” but he says, “I would never say that. My wife is a bitch and I like her very much.” And he tells stories about how she doesn’t care what people think about her and for that, she is his hero.

I think John Mulaney is very funny. Although, and this will become relevant later, a lot of his humor is based around the relatability and likeability of his character. I had a similar upbringing to him so I look at John Mulaney and I see my cousins, the kids I grew up with, I’m reminded of kidding around with other friends in the back of class at Catholic school. His comedy almost gave me the sensation that I knew him and so I was rooting for him, and a lot of other fans of his felt the same way.

Shit Hits the Fan

Okay, so now it’s going to get very gossip-columny for a moment here. Bear with me; I promise it’s related to the book.

In December 2020, after being confronted by a group of concerned friends in an intervention, John Mulaney went to rehab for alcoholism, cocaine addiction, and prescription drug abuse. About a month later, in January 2021, his wife, Anna Marie Tendler, also went into an in-patient program, not for substance abuse, but rather for depression, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. The book that I will be reviewing today starts with Tendler’s admission into this rehabilitation facility. From the book, it seems like she spent about a month there. Side note: she goes out of her way to mention the fancy schmancy part of the rehab facility where all the rich people go, and I wonder if that’s where her husband was. Hmmmm.

The tabloids reported that John Mulaney left rehab in the end of March 2021. Now, I do not know this story personally, but considering that it usually takes about nine months for a healthy human baby to grow, we can assume, that almost immediately after leaving rehab, John Mulaney conceived a baby, not with his wife, Anna Marie Tendler, but with the famous actress Olivia Munn. Now, at this point, the public does not know that yet. As far as the tabloids know, Mulaney and Tendler are still married and co-parenting their dog Petunia with no plans of having children. 

But, two months later, in May of 2021, presumably after Mulaney finds out he’s gonna be a father to, what us Irish Catholics like to call, a nine-pound preemie, Mulaney and Tendler announce that, after seven years of a rather public marriage, they are getting a divorce. But, instead of a spit-polished PR statement from the couple saying that it was mutual, the public gets a brief, yet heartwrenching, statement from Anna Marie Tendler, in which she says. “I am heartbroken that John has decided to end our marriage.” 

In September 2021, two months before John Mulaney’s first born came into the picture, he announced to the public that he was having a baby with Olivia Munn. On “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” John Mulaney said, “I went to rehab in September, OK? I got out in October.”

Anyways, here’s the news when he went into his 60-day program in the end of December.

But yeah, October. Sure, John. 

John shared with the public: “I move out of my home from my ex-wife. Then, in the spring, I went to Los Angeles and met and started to date a wonderful woman named Olivia. I got into this relationship that’s been really beautiful with someone incredible. And we’re having a baby together.” 

Munn would later admit, “It was a surprise pregnancy. I did not have any doctor team ready. I had no idea.” The bundle of joy is born and John Mulaney almost immediately starts sharing loving posts, photos, and videos of his new girlfriend and son, Malcolm. He gets back into standup.

And, if I could say one thing to John Mulaney about all of this it would be: if you actually care about being a family man, and not just portraying a family man for the sake of your public image, then get your babies’ gorgeous, innocent faces off social media. They didn’t choose to be a part of this drama, and they certainly can’t consent to being broadcasted to millions of followers, many of whom are diagnosably psychotic creeps who think they are your friends. Have you learned nothing? You called likability a prison, so why are you knocking down the door of the jail trying to get locked back up again, this time with your babies? They didn’t ask to go to jail. And yet he posts not just their faces, but also their full government names to an audience of millions of fans and haters!

Meanwhile, Anna Marie Tendler, is out of mental health rehabilitation and sharing harrowing photography self-portraits that depict her alone, pale, and crying in a large, empty house. On Mother’s Day, John Mulaney shares an image of him kissing Olivia Munn after giving birth to their son, and Tendler in turn shares a photo of her feeding their dog out of a bottle with a blindfold on. In her portraits she looks unhealthy and emaciated and you can see scars from self-harm. The images are artful and powerful; she doesn’t shy away from her pain or try to portray a prettied up, false reality.

In April, 2023, the dog that Tendler and Mulaney had together passed away and they both posted on social media about how torn up they were feeling.

And when John Mulaney went through this public fall from grace, as a fan, I was so disappointed. Just kidding, I don’t know these people personally, so their life decisions have no emotional effect on me at all. But, he had built his career around this image: his relationship and marriage and this humble, Nice Guy, I’m just a skinny, dorky millennial type of vibe, and it’s hard to maintain an image like that with a spurned ex-wife, a child out of wedlock, and expensive jawline implants. People accused him of being a “wife guy,” which is someone who uses the image of a kind, good man who loves his wife to improve his public image, while, in private, he mistreats or belittles his wife. 

So Mulaney came out with a new comedy special in 2023 called Baby J. In Baby J, he opened up about the fact that he had been using essentially throughout his whole career and only got sober in 2020 when he went to rehab. He doesn’t say much at all about his divorce or ex-wife, but he does talk about his new partner and baby. 

Personally, there were parts of this special that made me laugh very hard; I still think that he is a super funny person. But because he was this character who I really liked and who reminded me of my friends and family, seeing him talk about being in the pits of addiction was honestly just really sad. You can tell he’s embarrassed by his own actions, but talking about them for the sake of the special, and people are laughing and I just kind of felt like wow that… sounds pretty rough, man, I’m glad you got some help. I don’t know if you saw Chris Rock’s post-divorce and post-Oscar-slap comedy special when you can tell he’s like, not in a good place, and not really processing the divorce well, and everyone is laughing like “Ha ha! He’s lonely and questioning his value as a man! I love comedy!” I came away from both of those specials with an icky feeling. 

That said, John Mulaney is at a point in his career where he already has the money and the fame and the lawyers and the PR and, as Anna Marie Tendler pointed out in her memoir, money is power. So he won an Emmy for his special, it had a huge audience, and, again, Mulaney got to share his side of the story. 

And it seemed like Anna Marie Tendler wouldn’t get to share her side, until she announced in March of this year, that she has a book coming out about “the endless source of [her] heartbreak and rage—men.” And now you’re all caught up.

That’s enough trashy celebrity gossip! Let’s move on to my very intellectual book review! (I’m just kidding. I’m super nosy; I followed the whole thing in real-time. I was eating it up!)

Men Have Called Her Crazy

So, Anna Marie Tendler’s book came out, and people who had been following her public image mostly assumed that it would be a John Mulaney tell-all. The New York Times published a review before it came out called “Anna Marie Tendler Knows You Think Her Book is About John Mulaney.”

 

Now I’m going to summarize the book. Trigger warnings: self-harm, suicide, disordered eating. If you have already read the book or if you don’t want spoilers, then scroll ahead– I give my opinions and review later on.

 

The book starts with Tendler checking into a rehab facility in New England due to suicide risk. The book then alternates between her odd-numbered chapters detailing her experience in rehab and even-numbered chapters sharing stories from before rehab, starting with when she was a teenager living through her parents’ divorce when she first started cutting herself. The chapters from the past focus almost exclusively on her relationships with men, and the implication is that her problems and her rehab stay are because of those men and how they treated her.

Anna goes into her past and shares the story of Ethan, a popular teenager who flirted with her at school, made out with her at her house, and invited her to the mall, then turned her down in front of his older, pretty, female coworkers, presumably to maintain a certain “image.” She also shares the story of Julian the cross-country runner who was interested and flirty in private or via text message, but again, doesn’t have the confidence to pay attention to high school Anna in public.

Meanwhile, in the odd-numbered therapy chapters, Anna meets the young women who she is sharing a house with. She had specifically requested to be in a house with only women, but the only all-women house was for people with addictions. So she was staying in an addiction-rehab house even though she wasn’t there for an addiction problem. And the other women share stories of their addictions, Tendler has a visceral reaction, feeling upset and angry with them for ruining the lives of their loved ones with their addictions (this is all internal– externally she is very kind to the other women) and she admits that she is in support groups for the loved ones of people addicted to narcotics and alcohol, and while she implies that the person who lived through addiciton in her life was her husband, she doesn’t say that outright. 

Tendler’s living situation is precarious at the time of writing the book. She shares that she was living in New York, and had only recently moved to Connecticut, but doesn’t know for how long she’ll be there. She also references her husband and her marriage a few times in passing without revealing any details. For example, one of the women in rehab is an artist, and she lights up when Tendler shares that she is also an artist. But Tendler admits to the girl that despite being an artist full time, she is still dependent on her husband’s income. 

The closest we get to understanding why Tendler is in rehab is this confession she makes in a group therapy session:

“I’ve had a really bad year. My life feels like it’s falling apart. Everything I thought I knew about my world is unraveling, and I feel powerless to stop it. I don’t know how I’m ever going to feel better. Some days I feel utterly hopeless. My wish for myself is that one day I’ll reach a place where I can face hardship–because I fear the worst is still to come–without trying to destroy myself.” And girl, you know, the worst was yet to come because your man is about to make a baby with Betsy Braddock.

Tendler worries in the book that her life has been a series of stops and starts. She started a dance career then quit due to an injury. She went to cosmotology school, but when she failed her certification exam, she never re-took it. She dropped out of art school. She cut people’s hair, then she quit. She became a makeup artist, then she quit. Throughout this time, she has been financially dependent on various romantic partners. She admits: “I have never felt truly good at any of the things that I have started. So I abandon them when the weight of mediocrity–or worse, inability–becomes too overwhelming.”

In the even-chapters, that delve into Tendler’s past, we learn that while Tendler is in her junior year of high school, her and her best friend start to get involved in the punk scene. At these shows, older band members take a romantic interest in her. She seeks out these shows to get away from the house, where her mother experiences bouts of rage that cause her to scream at Anna for innocuous “offenses.” When the police find 16-year-old Anna and a 23-year-old punk musician in a car hooking up, he lies about her age and the police let them go, then he ghosts her. The whole environment of the punk scene at this time, as Anna describes it, was very predatory. Her and her friends are constantly trying to ward off advances from older men, sometimes in their mid-40s. 

In therapy, Tendler makes bracelets and meets a dog and grows little plants and goes to yoga. She talks a lot about her anger and resentment toward men, and quickly becomes irritated in almost every interaction she has with other men in the facility, including the therapists.

In another flashback, Anna tells the story of meeting Sam, a 28-year-old punk artist, when she was 17. Sam and Anna start dating and she loses her virginity to him. He is very kind to her at first– he doesn’t pressure her and he takes care of her. So Anna moves to LA, to “go to cosmetology school,” but really to move in with Sam. Then there start to be moments where he gets really upset with her, often for making little mistakes like forgetting about rotten fruit on top of the fridge, mistakes that any young person would make, he berates her for them, as if forgetting that he is dating a seventeen-year-old. 

Sam is often on tour and leaves Anna alone in his apartment. She becomes isolated on the West Coast, without internet access, and away from her family and friends. Eventually, she goes home for a visit, leaving all her stuff in Sam’s apartment. She gets the courage to call him and break up with him and he gets angry with her. She tries to get in touch with him a few more times to get her stuff back but he ghosts her. 

Back in the therapy chapters, Anna tries to leave rehab, but at her outtake meeting, her therapist says she doesn’t want to work with her anymore and phrases it as “it’s time for us to get a divorce,” and apparently Anna is going through a divorce at this time even though she hasn’t told us anything about it, so this comment causes a nervous breakdown for her, and she extends her stay in rehab.

So, in the flashbacks, after her breakup with the punk artist, Anna moves to New York, gets an apartment with her best friend, works at a hair salon, and takes some college classes in art history. Amanda, Anna’s best friend starts working at a famous website and at a party, Anna meets the CEO of this famous website, who she calls Theo. I’m not trying to get sued so I’ll just say that users on Reddit have speculated that Theo is actually the founder of College Humor, Ricky Van Veen. And “Theo” has just sold his website and became a multi-millionaire in his mid-20s. 

 

While the other men Anna has dated up until this point have been, what she calls, “alternative, effortlessly cool,” Theo is dorky (and she also says he’s not funny which is hilarious, by the way, that she chose to include that about the founder of CollegeHumor). 

But there is a woman openly interested in Theo named “Rachel.” Users on Reddit speculate that Reachel is Julia Allison, who is like an influencer or something. And this bitch Rachel tells Anna at a party that Theo doesn’t want to date a hairdresser who lives in Queens. Anna tells Theo about this but he just laughs it off.

Anna goes to parties at Theo’s place in the Hamptons and he encourages her to quit the salon and start cutting hair freelance so that he can tell people his girlfriend owns a business instead of telling people that she cuts hair. She cuts Rachel’s hair and Rachel refuses to pay her, which Theo thinks is funny. Anna is irritated by everyone in the Hamptons; she calls them posers and thinks they are deeply uncool. After more than a year together, when Anna tells Theo that she can’t go to the Hamptons again because she has to stay in the city and work, he says that he will pay her to clean his six-bedroom mansion so that she can stay. She says she doesn’t think it’s a good idea. 

Theo takes Anna to Japan, and on the way back, she catches him reading an email from Rachel in which Rachel called Anna a gold-digger and she told Theo that Anna is using him. Then Rachel is like, not me though, I pay for myself and I’m also chill and different. If you didn’t live through the millennial, not-like-other-girls, pick-me era, you are so fortunate. It was an epidemic.

 

Anna freaks out in the airport and tells Theo, “I can’t believe that you have refused to stand up for me, you have repeatedly told me that I’m overreacting, you have continuously put me in social situations with this woman, you pretended you didn’t have a previous relationship. Not a single time have you considered my feelings. You were only worried about protecting yourself and not losing her attention.” And she calls him a liar and storms off while everyone in the airport watches the whole ordeal. Then Tendler writes: “Here is the thing about men lying to women while telling them they are crazy or overreacting. The lying, the underplaying on their side, makes us doubt our intuition and intelligence, so eventually when suspicions are confirmed, when we find out we have been correct all along, we do go batshit fucking crazy. And it is warranted.” The pair breaks up not long after.

Anna becomes a makeup artist, she works on sets all day. I guess that it was around this time that she met John Mulaney, but she doesn’t tell us that. There is a story about a crazy woman mistreating Anna on set and she decides to quit being a makeup artist. She starts making lampshades. And it’s around here that things start getting really vague. Stories that, up until this point, were deeply personal and revelatory, are now surface-level and random. 

Back in therapy, new women arrive, some of the young women who Anna was close with end up leaving and she’s pretty bummed about it. There’s a story about everyone sneaking off the one night and Anna wants to go but doesn’t, then they all get drug tested and they come back clean, and you keep thinking something is going to come of this story but nothing does and I have no idea why she included it and why she stretched it out through multiple chapters. It’s like she didn’t have anything else to write about therapy so she was just like, “Uh, and then some people I didn’t know went on a walk.”

In 2013, Anna gets a puppy named Petunia. She writes about this dog with so much love. She got Petunia with John Mulaney, I know that from photos of him with the puppy and from his standup, but he is still conspicuously missing from these chapters. She takes Petunia to a “dog communicator,” so as a reader of course I’m thinking: Okay, so she has money now. And if you follow celebrity gossip then you know why: at this point she’s already married to a hyper-successful famous comedian. But if you came to this book with a blank slate you would think: Did I miss something? Cuz two chapters ago she was washing hair for eight bucks the hour in New York, and now she’s quitting her job because it’s boring and paying for someone to pretend to read her dog’s mind? Is the decorate lampshade business mor lucrative than I thought?

Back to the therapy storyline, Anna decides to split with Dr. Karr, the therapist who said they needed a divorce. And Dr. Karr becomes like super evil again and accuses Anna of manipulating her male therapists at rehab. This therapist’s sudden character change, from like a long-term, helpful contact to Anna into someone who seems to want to hurt her is also never explained, so I don’t really know what to tell you. But it really hurts our narrator. 

She goes home, she talks a bit about her DBT support group and her foray into photography, and the next time she goes into the past to talk about her backstory, all of a sudden, she is post-divorce. She’s dating a guy named Reece, and they are arguing because she said that she doesn’t want to have sons and he tells her that, because of this comment, his female friends called her crazy, godless, and soulless. This comment struck me as kind of anti-semetic, like of all the insults you could have chosen, why did you say “soulless and Godless.” Like why are you bringing God into this? But also, yeah, she should not have said that she would not want to have a son, because if your kids aren’t even born and you’re already trying to dictate shit that neither mother nor child can change then you’re definitely not ready to be a parent.

Then in response to this comment, Anna writes: “I hate men. I hate them so much. Men are the cause of all my problems. Men are the cause of everyone’s problems. They are stupid and they are arrogant. They think everything they say is true and right. I hate them so fucking much I don’t even know if I can fuck them anymore.” Okay!

So, before this, we know that Anna Marie Tendler hates men when she is in therapy, but while she was talking about her dating history, she didn’t really take on this perspective. This “I hate men; men are the cause of all my problems” tune, is new; it is post-divorce. Something happened to our narrator that changed her character. 

If you don’t know that, at this time, her ex-husband who publicly claimed to never want children was now sharing loving photos of the son he conceived with another woman while still married to Anna, then this sudden change is jarring and it comes across as an overreaction. Her whole stint in therapy seems random and inexplicable. As the reader, at this point, I’m flipping back through the memoir to see if I accidentally skipped a chapter, but I didn’t. She did not talk about her husband, their courtship, their seven-year marriage, their messy divorce. None of it. 

Anna and Reese break up. Anna, who at this point is 36 and divorced, decides to freeze her eggs. It costs $12,000, the process is long and grueling, (but, and this is me editorializing, for all of her perhaps more fertile years, she was married to John Mulaney who said he didn’t want kids, so now she likely feels that it’s her last chance to freeze her eggs so she tries). And in the end they are able to harvest eight eggs and she is disappointed, she was hoping for more because often some of those eggs aren’t viable or they don’t take, so they recommend another round of IVF so they can get more eggs and she decides to not do it.

Anna is destroyed by a situationship with a man named Javier. Petunia, Anna’s dog, gets sick and they will need to put her down and there is a very special chapter during which Anna outlines how she walked Petunia to each room in her house and talked to her about memories that they made in there. 

In the end of the book, Anna gets a summary of her rehab experience from her therapists and feels mischaracterized by them, so she kind of takes her book as a chance to disprove things they said and set the record straight with them. She talks about how her mental health is now and while she does celebrate her growth, she also is very honest about the fact that she’s not “healed,” and she writes “I won’t pretend that I’m miraculously happy now, that I never think about wanting to die. I do.” I think that to write anything else, like anything that frames it as though now she’s all better and she has all the answers, it would have been disingenuous, so I liked this ending aside from the random vendetta against her therapists.  

My Critique of Men Have Called Her Crazy”

Victim Mentality

Reviewers’ biggest criticism of this book has to do with the protagonist’s life view. She hates men, that much is clear, and she also openly blames men for all of her problems, which means that she herself does not take responsibility or assume guilt for any errors she commits in her life. This makes for a frustrating memoir, because memoirs usually have the format of a character arc, and you don’t change or mature as a character if you never own up to your mistakes. Because why would you change if nothing was your fault in the first place? I will go deeper into this criticism later. 

As a Celebrity Memoir

Overall, for a celebrity memoir, it’s pretty artistic. I’m actually wondering if Jeanette McCurdy sort of raised the bar for what people expect from celebrity memoirs because usually celebrity memoirs are really, really bad, and so according to that standard, this one was surprisingly good. But if this were just a book written by a full-time writer, I would be more more critical of it and I would call it mediocre. That said, I know that Tendler isn’t a writer so I was actually surprised by her ability to write. Tendler is an artist, you can tell. You can also definitely tell that she is a visual artist because she’s skilled when it comes to describing scenery, if at times I felt that she didn’t want to explain the environment to the reader so much as show the reader how much she knows about interior design. In general, I think she has a poetic way of viewing and describing the world.

Publishing

A little background on this book from a publishing perspective: Tendler shared in an interview that this book was originally going to be a book of photographs with snippets of memoir writing. Then an editor from Simon and Schuster named Sean Manning who was also the editor for I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy convinced Tendler to write a full memoir, probably by saying something along the lines of: if you write a memoir and we market it as a John Mulaney tell-all, then I could make a lot of money.” Just kidding, he probably said something artsy like “This feels like it wants to be a memoir,” and she ate that shit up. “This photography book feels like it wants to be a celebrity memoir that makes me a lot of money.” 

With that context into the publishing process, I thought to myself: I wish she had done a book of photography! Her photography is great; beter than her writing, I think. And if she only had to include little autobiographical snippets, then she wouldn’t have had to fluff up her book with things like: “Once at rehab I saw some turkeys.” 

So this book had the same editor as “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” and it seemed like they were trying to replicate the success of Jeanette McCurdy’s memoir. A New York Times review before release compared Tendler’s book to McCurdy’s book. But I do not think that’s a fair comparison; McCurdy’s book was far superior to Tendler’s. A more apt comparison would be saying: Imagine the book “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” but if McCurdy wasn’t allowed to talk about her mom. You would be reading this book just like……………. Why is she so sad?

Other Book Comps/ Recommendations

I agree with the Washington Post’s take that the book feels like it should have just been a therapy journal at times. But even as a therapy journal it wasn’t great either, because she doesn’t try that many different therapeutic techniques. If you liked the therapy parts but were left wanting more, I would sooner recommend What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo. Foo, in her book, tries every type of therapy and therapeutic activity that someone with a decent amount of money in New York City can find and she documents the whole process while also telling traumatic stories from her childhood. I didn’t personally enjoy What My Bones Know; I thought that the author/ narrator Stephanie Foo approached therapy with a lot of entitlement and classism. For example, if there was a therapist that was cheaper, then Foo would criticize their clothes, their interior design, and their appearance, then eventually ditch them even if they were helpful, then when she goes to an exorbitantly expensive therapist she’s just immediately on board with him and in awe of him. But regardles of my criticisms of Stephanie Foo, there is no contesting that in that book she really demonstrated an iron will– she was ready to heal and she was willing to fight for it, so if you came away from Men Have Called Her Crazy feeling disappointed with the therapeutic options explored or not explored by Tendler, then you might enjoy What My Bones Know. 

Also, if you liked the parts that Tendler wrote about Petunia, I would recommend the book Dog Medicine: How My Dog Saved Me From Myself by Julie Barton; really lovely little book about a woman who overcomes depression with a golden retriever.

Ex-Husband’s Ommission: A Feminist Choice or An NDA?

Now, earlier I touched on some theories as to why Tendler didn’t mention her ex-husband with many reviewers framing this as a feminist choice. Even her editor said in a New York Times interview, “Her identity has been very much limited and diminished by a perception of who she is. Now, she’s able to speak for herself, and she’s able to tell the story that she wants to tell.” 

I really disagree that it was a feminist choice to omit her ex-husband’s story. I believe that my theory that her hands were tied by an NDA is supported in the text. Here is my evidence that this was an NDA-memoir:

• • Exhibit A: Anna Marie Tendler holds grudges. Tendler’s writing style is not subtle, to the point where I asked myself at times if she wrote this book, just to settle scores. When Reece called her “Godless” for not wanting to have sons, she spent an entire chapter writing out their whole argument. And, as a reader, I was asking myself if this was relevant to the story itself, or if she just really, really, wanted us to know that she was right, and I think it was the latter. In his comedy, John Mulaney portrayed this woman as super tough, like an MMA fighter, but the woman who I met in this memoir was instead passive to a fault. There were many circumstances where she did not stand up for herself and did not say how she felt, then, sometimes decades later, sat down to write chapters and chapters about how she was right and they were wrong. And now us readers are subjected to reading about how right she was, but in reality, the reader is a neutral third party who typically doesn’t really care who won in an argument between you and your therapist. Knowing what I know now about Anna Maeria Tendler, I am pretty sure that if she wan’t silenced by an NDA, then she would have used this book as a chance to air out everything that went unsaid during her divorce, because I’m almost certain that there are more resentment involved in a divorce than against a beauty school professor who hit on her once in 2004. That brings me to:

• Exhibit B: She wrote about everyone else. In the acknowledgements of her book, Tendler wrote a note to her friends and family. She said, “Everyone has their side of the story. This is mine.” She needed to do that because she wrote about the worst moments of her mother, her brother, her father, her step-mother, her dog, her therapist, and she didn’t write about her ex-husband because she wanted to make a feminist statement? Give me a break, it was an NDA. 

• Exhibit C: She cares about the artistic integrity of her work. 

Reason #1: AMT Holds Grudges and She Writes About It

If the omission were a feminist choice made by Anna Marie Tendler, I think that she would have said that. Her writing style is not subtle, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But when she wants to make a point, she drives it home over entire chapters. This is a woman who holds a grudge; so much so that the Washington Post said her book “reads like a therapy journal exercise padded with extraneous dialogue and some score-settling.” 

There were times when I was reading and I wondering if she wrote this book just to settle scores. There is a chapter where she is explaining to her post-divorce boyfriend, Reece, that she doesn’t want to have sons, and would prefer to have daughters and they get in an argument, and she just goes on and on about this point and as a reader I’m thinking, okay, she really wants us to know that she is right. There are also many instances where someone in her therapy group or a therapist or a counselor says something that she doesn’t agree with, and she didn’t respond to them in person or tell them how she really felt, then she turns around and writes paragraphs and paragraphs about it. And I know that writing out the words you didn’t say can be a cathartic exercise, but the author must ask herself if she is including these words in the book because they are central to the point she wants to make or because she didn’t say what she really wanted to say about it in person, so now she wants to “let it out” with the reader (an unrelated third party, who often doesn’t really care who won in an argument between you and your therapist). 

Given that she holds a grudge, given that her writing style isn’t subtle, and given that it really seems sometimes like she wrote this book to settle scores– I think that if her hands weren’t tied by an NDA, then she would have taken this book as a chance to air out all of the words left unsaid in her divorce. And even if she wanted to make the point of “I am not defined by my divorce,” then I think she would have said that as well. As I said, it’s not a subtle writing style. She tells you what she wants you to believe. 

I want to mention that this person who I got to know in the book, who time and time again does not speak up when people are cruel to her, only to hold onto a grudge toward that person for years afterwards, is a direct contrast to the mean, green fighting machine that John Mulaney said she was in his standup. In this book she is passive to fault.

Reason #2: She Wrote About Everyone Else

This woman told stories about the worst moments of her mother, her father, the boys she dated in high school, her mentors, her friends, and her dog, but did not talk about her husband: the main reason why she was in in-patient therapy. You could say, well, maybe she didn’t want to do the same for John Mulaney since he’s a public figure, but she was not shy about talking about her College Humor ex-boyfriend and his lack of backbone. She even included a note in her acknowledgments addressed to her closest family members and said: “Everyone has their side of the story. This is mine.” And those people I mentioned are people who she loves and respects a lot; she didn’t talk about them to embarrass them, she talked about them because she’s an artist who chose to tell her story, and they are part of her story. It wouldn’t be complete without them. That brings me:

Reason #3: She Cares About the Artistic Integrity of Her Work

There was a review on GoodReads after the book came out that was from someone who was a fan of Anna Marie Tendler independently of her marriage, just because of her art. They said that they read this book without any backstory or any knowledge of what happened, and they were just confused for most of the book. I don’t see how it is a feminist choice to write a book about your life already assuming that everyone knows about your ex-husband and his escapades. Because then someone who doesn’t know anything about your husband then cannot read your book, they are locked out of it. 

If there is one thing clear about Tendler from this book, it’s that she is an artist. She was born to be creative. I can say as someone who is also a writer, that it’s not easy to write about your personal life and potentially expose people who you love and care about to criticism. But if you care about the artistic integrity of your work, you still do it, because you trust that your love and respect for that person will shine through in the words you write and your work will thus become a love letter and not an expose. Tendler has said that she knew the number one criticism of her book would be that she didn’t talk about John Mulaney. If she knew that would be a major issue in her work of art, then I don’t believe she would have left it out unless she had no choice because of an NDA. 

Reason #4: She is Financially Dependent on Him

Tendler mentions her financial dependence on her husband from the very beginning of the book. Not only that, but she admits that her entire artistic career has been dependent on a series of romantic partners. At the time of writing the book, she doesn’t know how to make money if it’s not through a boyfriend or husband. This is something we call the Cinderella Complex, which is a book that Anna Marie Tendler should certainly read.

Given her financial stake in the game, there’s a very high chance that Mulaney and his legal team could say, “If you want alimony, you cannot write or speak publicly about our relationship.” Or even scarier, “If you speak about our relationship, we will publicly assassinate your image, making it impossible for you to become a successful artist on your own accord.” I’ll speak about that second one a bit more later.

Reason #5: She Shared a Review from the Atlantic that Called Her Book “An NDA Memoir”

The Atlantic published a review of this book called “A Memoir About Recovering from Men,” and Anna Marie Tendler gave it a grid post on Instagram and this was the caption:

“When I wrote Men Have Called Her Crazy I knew from the beginning what the major criticism would be. I chose to write despite that, hoping I’d create a work worthy of reading with a critical eye—both for what was in it and what was left out. As a reader of The Atlantic and a great admirer of Sophie Gilbert’s cultural criticism I am deeply proud to see MHCHC considered with such thought and nuance. And goddamn, what a headline. Thank you to everyone—the journalists and the readers alike—who has given my book their time and energy.”

So I saw her Instagram post and I opened the review and this paragraph stood out to me:

“When [Tendler’s] 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… 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.”

So, to summarize, of all the reviews that have been written about this book, the one that Tendler most loved and celebrated publicly was the one that explicitly called this book what it was: an NDA memoir.

Reason #6: Celebrities Spend the Big Bucks to Control Their Image

You have to understand that, even if you feel that John Mulaney is funny and cool and nice, and maybe you even think of him as if he were someone you know, the reality is that, how you and I experience “John Mulaney” is actually the result of hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal branding. What we see is carefully curated by focus groups and marketing studies and PR and lawyers and contracts. 

I’m not anti-John Mulaney, I’m just making the point that none of us know either of these super famous people, so if you think, “John Mulaney is the bad guy!” or “Actually Anna Marie Tendler is the bad guy!” (GoodReads has filled up with reviews like that) then your opinion isn’t based on reality and has probably been influenced by branding and PR, I mean, these are people whose finances depend heavily on their personal brand, so it’s simply a wise business decision to spend money to defend their reputation. 

This is especially true for someone whose career hinges on their relatability and likeability. 

 

Reason #7: They Could Have Assasinated Her Character

If there is bad press about someone, that person’s PR team will hire an SEO agency to fill the first pages of search results about their name with neutral or positive press so that all the negative press gets pushed back to pages 2, 3, and 4 where no one goes. They will pay people on social media to say positive things about this person so you log onto Twitter and only hear about their great attributes.

But the craziest thing is that they wouldn’t even have to work that hard to convince people that Anna actually deserved what she got. Because when there is a celebrity divorce or breakup, the gossipy pubilc is often very quick to blame the woman– check out Linsday Ellis’s video about Yoko Ono.

I saw another example of this recently. There was this influencer couple who became famous because he was a tailor and fashion designer, and she was a model. He would make outfits specifically for her. But then this couple broke up, and they didn’t post much about it. But at one point the woman in the relationship shared a video about falling for someone else and begging them not to embarrass her with the Sabrina Carpenter song, Please Please Please, and the comments under her video filled with tens of thousands of people saying, “You dated the nicest guy in the universe. How dare you?!” And I thought, Oh you know them? You know these people? You know he’s just the nicest guy? You don’t know what went on between these two random content creators when the cameras were off. And as people, when we don’t fully know a situation, then our unconscious biases are very quick to fill in the gaps, often with incorrect assumptions. 

Reason #8: Addiction Ain’t Cute

The stories that John Mulaney told in his standup when he was “opening up” about his experience in the throes of addiction were vanilla. The most disturbing, private facts of his addiction are not public knowledge, and with good reason, the things that people do when they have an addiction can be quite shocking. I don’t know what Anna Marie Tendler went through as the spouse of a person with addiction, but it is clear in this memoir that she has been traumatized. Whatever it was that she experienced, changed her personality and it changed her outlook on the world, to the point where she did not want to be alive anymore. And some of what happened was public gossip, but a lot of that we do not know anything about.

When people become addicted to substances and they lose themselves, a lot of the time it isn’t even enjoyable. It gets to the point where it doesn’t even feel good anymore, but it has such control over you that you can’t stop. And I get the impression that John Mulaney perhaps wishes that he were this shiny, clean family man, and that could be partly why he desperately holds onto that image with his nails sunk in. That might be why he always tries to put that idea forth in his social media and his standup. But being a good man is a lot of work, and addiction really gets in the way, so in his case it might be easier to instead just pay people to convince us that he’s a good man.

Between John Mulaney and his new wife Olivia Munn, there are probably upwards of hundreds of people working on their reputation management. And their biggest casualty was Anna Marie Tendler’s book, which I believe could have been great. I understand it, but I hate to see another artist silenced and it bothered me to see how many reviewers tried to paint her silence as a choice and not just another instance of oppression in her life. 

“I Hate Men”

Now, I’m going to take this chance to discuss my biggest gripe with this book, and it’s not that she didn’t mention John Mulaney, although that is related. I take issue with the main philosophy of this book, which is the gender essentialism. So that’s the idea that men are a certain way, and women are a certain way. When people who are misogynistic engage in this belief, it’s usually to justify sexist beliefs. For example, “Women are born to be caretakers. They are more loving. Men are born to be protectors. They’re stronger. They’re just born that way.” 

But, interestingly, you also see a lot of self-proclaimed feminists engaging with this philosophy, just in a different way, saying things like, “All men are cheaters. Men are trash. Men are stupid. Women are intuitive. Women are smart and kind. Women are trapped in a perpetually victimized dynamic because men are inherently victimizers and predators.” 

This is Anna Marie Tendler’s philosophy in this book. She tries to backtrack sometimes, for example, at the end of the book she says, “I don’t hate men. I still want to fuck them.” But it seems almost more like an editor asked her to include those lines and she begrudgingly acquiesced, whereas the rest of the book very passionately shares the philosophy of: I hate men, because I am perpetually victimized by them, because I am a woman. 

There is almost a full chapter dedicated to an argument she has with a post-divorce boyfriend, Reese, in which she tells him that if she has a baby, she doesn’t want to have a boy. And her boyfriend takes issue with this statement and he says you could teach that baby to be a good man, and she argues that even if she teaches him to be a good man, he will still be socialized by friends, teachers, media, etc., to be just like all the other men who have oppressed and vicitmized her. This is gender essentialism in different clothes. Whereas a misogynist may believe that we are limited by our gender at birth, Tendler believes that we are limited by the behaviors of the gender that we are socialized to become. 

There are a few issues with both of these philosophies and approaches to gender. We have a spectrum between people who think that we are born with a certain sex and that then determines all gender expression. Born woman pink kitchen! Born man blue gun! Then on the other side we have people who beilieve that all gender is a performance, and it is socialized into you. If a little girl wants to dress up as a princess, it’s because she has already been socialized to think that she has to be pretty, spoiled, and saved, not because there is something inherent in her that makes her more interested in princesses and her brother more interested in Transformers. 

Most people will tell you that how you express yourself in relation to your gender is probably a combination of nature and nurture. The fact that transgender people exist is evidence that we do not always become the stereotypes of the gender that we were socialized into, but I also don’t think that women are born destined to either embody femininity or be depressed. People find great joy in incorporating both traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine traits into their personality and habits, and many of us are fortunate to live in a society that is advanced enough to not overtly punish us for either of those manifestations. 

But because Anna Marie Tendler has written about how men have trapped her in the role of the infinite victim, and she chose to name her book, “Men Have Called Her Crazy,” then we’re going to engage with that type of gender essentialism. This “I Hate Men,” with a capital M, life view. 

I don’t like gender essentialist, “I Hate Men” feminism; in this book, or as a whole. And when I was writing this review, I thought a lot about why I don’t like that philosophy. And there are a few reasons; not least of which is that hate is a burden to bear that often hurts those who feel that hatred far more than the object of their hatred.

But after thinking about what I wanted to communicate here for a while, I realized that, when you have an “I hate men” lifeview, it’s hard for your feminism to also be intersectional, because if you see men as perpetual oppressors and women as perpetual victims, then you ignore a lot of other forms of opression that can and do oppress men as well as women– up to and including the gender binary. Especially when wealthy white women have this world view where they always see themselves as the oppressed party, it raises an eyebrow for me because I think, if you have a lot of money and fame, and if you’re white, then there are a lot of scenarios where you could be the one punching down, and if you always see yourself as a victim, then you may be blinded to the reality of a situation when you are the one doing the oppressing. Does that make sense? 

I’ll elaborate more later on, but first, let me argue against myself for a second because I think this is relevant. Have you ever seen a rescue dog who is afraid of men? Maybe the dog is completely fine being surrounded by women, but as soon as a man enters the room, even if that dog has never interacted with that man before, all of a sudden it’s barking and backing up and freaking out. You wouldn’t, in that scenario, look at the dog and say, “Your philosophy is flawed!” as I am doing now about Anna Marie Tendler’s book. You would very logically conclude, “Oh, it was abused by a man.” 

When people say, “I hate men. Men are trash.” You usually look behind that thin curtain and find someone who is exhibiting a trauma response. And that’s what this book is. Anna Marie Tendler is saying she hates men and saying she doesn’t want to have a son, because she is traumatized, not because she’s trying to promote white feminism and victim complexes. Or maybe she is, again, this woman is a stranger to me. 

But that’s why I want to be clear in that I’m not attacking her so much as I am going after the philosophy of the book. Because this book has the philosophy and the message of a traumatized person, who cannot talk about what traumatized her. So instead of recognizing and understanding her philosophy as what it is: a dark, destructive, displeasurable, defense mechanism, the reader gets the impression that this philosophy is what she has decided to believe, sound of mind. And that’s why the omission of her experience with John Mulaney was the fatal flaw of this book. Trauma itself is illogical, unexpected, and horrifying. So it makes sense that the aftermath of trauma, and the conclusions that you make about the world in response to trauma, are also illogical. So without the story of what Anna is reacting to, we don’t get the fact that her worldview at this time is a trauma response, and we just find the flawed philosophy. It’s like we stumbled upon a beach town wrecked by a hurricane and, looking at the branches and the buildings on the ground, asked ourselves: why did they decide to build it like this?

So let’s engage with the “I Hate Men” philosophy as it appeared in this book even though this book was murdered and dismembered by an NDA. 

Once, I was chatting with an English student of mine in her mid-30s and she told me, “I hate all men. Because all men, even if they seem like good men, are part of a patriarchal system that oppresses women.” 

This student was a white woman, so out of curiosity, I said, “Okay. How do you feel about people who say: I hate all white people.”

And she was taken aback. She said, “That’s not fair.”

I said, “Ah, why not? By your logic, aren’t all of us part of a racist system that oppresses anyone who isn’t white?”

And she thought about it. She was a very smart student. And she said, “Okay, that makes sense. If somebody was from a racist country like you,” (I’m from the United States) “then a black American could say: ‘I hate all white Americans.’ But I’m not from a racist country. So even though I’m white, it wouldn’t be fair for someone to say that about me. Because I’m not from The States.”

Reader, she was from Argentina.

So I see where she is coming from. I mean, in the United States, the famous president who committed genocide against our indigenous populations is on the $20 bill. Contrast this with Argentina, where the famous president who committed genocide against indigenous populations is on the $100 peso bill. I mean, anti-racism is so baked into the philosophy of Argentina that they opened their doors to thousands of German political refugees after World War II!

I’m being facetious, but the point I’m making is that Argentina (like most countries– I’m not singling out Argentina) has a history of racism that is still noticeable in their modern culture. We’ll call that “invisble oppression:” social hierarchies and subconscious biases that can lead to the oppression of a certain cultural group. But my student wasn’t willing to recognize invisible oppression when it benefitted her because of her race. Because her worldview only allowed her to see herself as an oppressed person due to her gender. And I understand: it’s easy to criticize and lament the existence of systems of oppression and invisible hierarchies when I’m the one being oppressed, but it’s harder to admit when those systems benefit me. Many people live with this philosophy: when things go badly for me, it’s because there are unfair systems in the world that oppress me even though I don’t deserve it. But when things go well for me, it can’t be because those same systems also benefit me sometimes; it must be because of personal merit. 

There’s a skit called New Terms from the Mexican sketch comedy group Backdoor where we see a man who has come to repair the wall in a wealthy woman’s house. When he tries to explain to her how he will fix the wall, she accuses him of mansplaining. He doesn’t understand this foreign term, and he keeps unintentionally offending her. She says, “You haven’t heard of mansplaining? Where have you been all this time?” And he says he’s from Ecatepec, a municipality in Mexico with a lot of poverty, and she says, “Ah, so you think that because you’re from Ecatepec that justifies your sexist behavior?” And he says, “No, I’m sorry, it’s just that all of these new terms are hard for me.” And she says “Oh your life is so hard as a cisgender straight male? Don’t talk to me about your life being hard, ok? I am a woman.” And the camera zooms out and she’s this tall, beautiful, well-dressed woman standing in her mansion and literally speaking down to the short, darker-skinned laborer who she hired to fix her house, and thus her hypocrisy is revealed. 

And I am certain from having read this book that Anna Marie Tendler has spent much of her life in environments where she is the most oppressed person in this room. But of course, that’s because she has been surrounded by ridiculously wealthy white men. Compared to the rest of the world, she hasn’t really dealt with oppression, but compared to the rest of the Hamptons, she was at the bottom of the totem pole. And that has clearly influenced her perspective. 

Social media is full of this hypocritical philsophy. Recently I saw a Tweet where someone shared a conversation with a person who she has commanded, through the app Instacart, to buy her groceries and deliver them to her house. And in the conversation, he tells her that they are out of whipping cream so he offers to bring her whipped cream instead. So she posted screenshots of their conversation and says, “Ban men from being Instacart Shoppers immediately!” And the Tweet received 133 thousand likes. 

Nevermind that the Instacart shopper’s first language might not be English. Never mind that they stopped and asked to double check with you instead of just buying you something that you don’t need. Never mind the level of luxury, wealth, comfort, and ease that you must live with to not even have to buy groceries, because you can rent another person to go do it for you. And you think yourself so important that that person pausing to ask you a simple question is a major inconvenience and slight on your precious time; so much so, that you have to take screenshots and complain about that person and shame them publicly– that person who is doing you a service and politely requesting your guidance. In reality, the woman who was mocking the Instacart driver was the one who was in a position of privilege in that scenario, but because she placed herself in the position of the one who is the more competent woman, forced to deal with a less competent man, she was validated for it on social media.

A great examination that I saw of this concept recently, and something that I really recommend reading, was Parul Sehgal’s review in the New Yorker of the novel “Liars” by Sarah Manguso. In that review, Sehgal tells us about the couple in this novel, Liars, named Jane and John, who were married, and are now getting divorced. Jane, the protagonist, spends the whole novel complaining about how she has to do everything in her marriage. She gripes about her husband’s incompetence, his laziness, his uselessness, for hundreds of pages, then when he leaves her for another woman, she begs him to stay. And if you were to ask Jane, this fictional character, about why her marriage came to an end, she would say: I was victimized. I was cheated on. I was spurned. 

But the reviewer of this novel, Sehgal, very adeptly points out many instances in the book in which Jane put her husband down, criticized his grammar, considered him beneath her. Still, Jane doesn’t consider that she could have something to do with the dissolution of her own marriage. She doesn’t consider that perhaps the blame is shared. Our protagonist is blind to that reality, because she decided she was a victim, and she locked in, and she found internet bubbles that would validate her helpless life view. 

The reviewer, Sehgal writes that this novel was essentially a lightly ficitonalized memoir about Manguso’s (the novel’s author), her own divorce. And the reviewer tells of another book, also written by Manguso in which she wrote a chapter about mistreatment she suffered from a doctor while ill. The reviewer writes of this chapter, 

“[I]n ‘The Two Kinds of Decay’…Manguso describes one of her doctors bungling a procedure, writing, with rage and disgust, about his clumsiness, his body odor. She never names him, but he provides the chapter heading: ‘The Sikh.’ My breath catches every time I recall it, her easy, unembarrassed way of not only reducing the man to his identity but having his identity announce the chapter, float over it, as if to explain his incompetence, his smell.” 

But if a woman reduces her identity to being more competent than all men and yet confined to a vicitmized body in all scenarios, then she fails to see when she herself becomes the victimizer. She fails to see how she might be the one “punching down” if she includes an angry chapter in her book titled “The Sikh” and criticizes the man’s stench. If you asked her about it, perhaps she would say that she was the one vicitmized in that scenario, because she was a woman whose medical concerns weren’t taken seriously by a male doctor, just as she was vicitmized by her husband when he left her after she spent an entire book, and perhaps an entire marriage, complaining about how much smarter she is than him.

When Anna Marie Tendler said that her book is about how men are her endless source of rage I was… skeptical. A wealthy white woman who says that men are the source of all problems in the world could easily write a book about how she is not accountable for any of her own failings and conveniently ignore the times when she was helped by the same system that she claims to despise. And in some ways I was right to feel weary of this title. Anna Marie Tendler has benefitted immensely from patriarchy. Remember, this is the woman who has never had a job, and has enjoyed a long absence of a career thanks to receiving financial support from her romantic partners. Anna Marie Tendler has received criticisms for this. Many of the reviews on Goodreads say things like:

“I didn’t trust the narrator, who never felt genuinely self reflective or responsible for anything.”

“It’s easy to blame all your problems on the patriarchy, on men, on sexism, but what’s really hard is acknowledging that although systems of oppression exist, you still have the autonomy to control your own future.”

“As much as she has endured bad treatment from men/the patriarchy/SOCIETY…also she has definitely financially benefitted from a series of wealthier boyfriends who supported her art/grad school/etc. It doesn’t seem like she’s ever had a true JOB. And not to channel my inner Puritan but she’s almost 40 and maybe like…get a job?????”

But after reading the book, while I do understand where these reviewers are coming from, remember again that we are looking at the account of a woman who was radicalized by her trauma, but she wasn’t allowed to write about the trauma that radicalized her. If she had written a book where she said: “I was victimized by a patriarchal society when my multi-millionaire celebrity husband used my image and his marriage with me to build up good will, then cheated on me and publicly humiliated me,” then it would be easy to respond with: yes, you were probably the victim in that scenario and I can see where your anger is coming from. But instead the book reads as: “I am a victim because one time my boyfriend Reece disagreed with me,” so a lot of the readers understandably felt like she had a victim complex. 

Tendler also finds herself in a frustrating position that many women find themselves in. She does not stand up for herself, so she ends up with a lot of bottled up rage. And this can happen to us even just scrolling on social media. Sometimes it’s easy to become to angry at heinous acts committed against women. I, too, feel so angry sometimes about things that have happened to me, things that I saw, the ways that women can be hurt and killed, and how often those who hurt them get away with it. But oftentimes, in the brief moment you had to fight back against that specific person, maybe you froze, or you couldn’t think of something to say, or it caught you off guard, or you were just a kid, and so you end up with so much anger and hurt bottled up inside you. But you can’t sit down with the patriarchy in a room and explain your gripes, so sometimes we take out those big emotions on our partners or social media or just with men as a concept. And they don’t always deserve it.

Here is a GoodReads review from a British person, and I disagree with a big portion of it, which I’ll explain after reading it:

“Profoundly unlikeable. Discovering that she has got to 37 and has never had an actual job, rather just always managed to date rich men who will fund her lifestyle genuinely almost made me fall off my chair. When the book was announced, I found it frustrating that she was only being referenced in the context of a man who had been in her life. But after reading it, it turns out that’s really all there is to her story.

A lot of her anxiety stems from feeling like she hasn’t accomplished anything, and honestly, I don’t know how to say this nicely: she hasn’t.

Yes, the patriarchy is real, but that doesn’t mean you have to place so much of your self-worth in men. I learnt this when I was sixteen. This book is not about the institutional misogyny that women face (especially in the medical world where a lot of this book takes place). Instead it is a laundry list of her ex-boyfriends, which makes the SNL sized absence even more notable and embarrassing. Plus (and this is mean) it’s hard to take complaints about heartbreak seriously when rich people say it. Imagine dealing with heartbreak *and* needing to go to work every day.”

Now, listen, being a human is hard. Right? We were chimpanzees who grew a frontol cortex so we could walk really far and plant seeds and take care of infants, and now we’re aware of our own death and in the blink of an eye we’ve been thrust into a world with shit like nine-to-fives and CyberTrucks and porn addicitons and substance abuse and The Constant Addicitve Livestream of the Worst Things You’ve Ever Seen Mixed with Stupid Opinions (AKA social media) and you wake up in the middle of the night with questions like “Why am I here? What is the point of all of this? How can I undo my wrongs?” And you will have to answer those questions regardless of whether or not you are wealthy and famous. So that’s why I don’t really like this response of, “You shouldn’t be sad! I should be sad!” Because it’s like, we should all be sad– I don’t believe that. I should say: We all have excuses to be sad if we so choose to take them. So then the question becomes less, “Who really deserves to be sad?” And more: “Who has had the maturity to develop a philosophy of resilience and gratitude, even in the face of having very real reasons to be sad?”

And this British reviewer is making some sense, I mean when you’re broke, you have to worry about all those questions I mentioned and on top of worrying about how you’re going to pay the bills. But, to be fair, Anna Marie Tendler also has dealt with things that most of us not-rich-and-famous people have never had to deal with. This reviewer urges us to imagine having your heart broken then having to wake up and go to work the next day. In response I would ask her to imagine having the worst moments of her life commented on and speculated about by millions of strangers. Not having to worry about that is a privilege of not being famous. 

I thought that this review was quite fair:

“The back half of the book sees the bottom fall out: in what, I’m sure, is meant to be a powerful act of omission, the book exists in a liminal space of elision. Tendler recounts bad experiences with two boyfriends and a decade vanishes: there is a very obvious lacuna haunting the text. The hatred of men extends beyond the 2020s memeification of gender essentialism and reveals something much darker lurking underneath, but even that becomes couched in the untouchable social justice language we’re all deeply familiar with as denizens of the internet, common enough to become meaningless.

Is your life predetermined because of your gender? because of your bad parents? because of your astrology? tl;dr: this feels like half a book. It is well written and powerful and sad and *good*, but there is very clearly a point where the story ran out and we get filler for a hundred pages bc Tendler refuses to contend with a lot of her own internal stuff, which feels odd for a mental illness memoir.”

So, I’m going to wrap this up, but there is one more thing that I wanted to include. 

Anna Marie Tendler succeeded in this book in showing us that she is a very kind person. She takes care of the other girls with her in in-patient rehabilitation. She believes that they will get better, and she herself wants to let go of the pain that has so plagued her. I spent a lot of this review pointing out the holes in the philosophy of her book, but I went into this story expecting, what her ex-husband described as, “A five-foot, dynamite, Jewish bitch,” and instead I found a sensitive woman in an immense amount of pain, who does not stand up for herself and instead opts to leave those words unsaid inside her to rot and turn to hatred. In the off-chance that Anna Marie Tendler is watching my channel with 68 subscribers, if she were my friend, I would tell her, forgive yourself and forgive the world that made you as you are. Because these nerds you used to date will spend their whole lives trying to be cool artists like you, and they will never succeed, because you can’t buy your way into being cool. I included a review earlier in which somebody said you haven’t achieved anything in your life, but that’s not true. Among other things, you wrote this book. You put yourself out there, and you gave us something to discuss, and I’m grateful to you for that. I’m also grateful to you for how kind you were to those young women in rehab with you. They probably really needed that.

Wow, you made it to the end of this monster review, thank you! Bye!