It’s Hard to Pull Off a Memoir About Hating Men When You Won’t (or Can’t) Write About Your Famous Ex

Many times while reading Anna Marie Tendler’s new memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy, I found myself thinking (and writing in the margins), “girl, pull it together!!” But it wasn’t a plea for her to quell her anxiety or stop dating men who display more red flags than a barrier island beach at rip tide. No, it was me begging Tendler’s ideas and anecdotes to coalesce into a thesis beyond blanket, basic hatred of men.

Most pop culture followers were introduced to Tendler through her ex-husband, comedian John Mulaney, who developed a reputation as a “wife guy” and spoke lovingly of Tendler in his standup specials. So when they split in spring 2021, following Mulaney’s 60-day stint in rehab, it was a bit shocking. At the time, the two revealed very little about the details of their split—save for Tendler’s statement: “I am heartbroken that John has decided to end our marriage.” Her fans’ spears were further sharpened when Mulaney was very shortly thereafter linked to Olivia Munn (they are now married) and Munn gave birth to their son in November 2021. At minimum, it’s an eyebrow-raising timeline.

Men Have Called Her Crazy sheds a little more light on that chronology. “My marriage was falling apart” following covid lockdown, Tendler writes. (In a 2023 essay for Elle, she explained, “Petunia [her dog] and I moved to Connecticut in December 2020, in the wake of my severe mental health breakdown and what appeared to be the impending end of my marriage.”) But that is the extent of Mulaney-related insight in her memoir, save for a brief mention of attending Al-Anon (Mulaney is open about being a recovering addict), and Tendler writing, “I am embarrassed to admit [my financial situation is] made stable by the security of my romantic partners.” (Similarly, Mulaney made no mention of Tendler in his first comedy special after their divorce.)

Writing around Mulaney is no small task and one that, ultimately, I don’t think Tendler successfully executes. His omission, for whatever reason (some people speculate there’s an NDA), begs the question of what else readers are supposed to glean from this book. The unsatisfying answer Tendler provides are tales of her two-week stay at an in-patient psychiatric hospital in January 2021 and recounting formative romantic and family relationships through her youth to early 20s. Those anecdotes themselves are, at times, insightful and relatable, but the memoir as a whole feels more like following stray yarns that never quite get woven into a fully fleshed out tapestry.

Without any details of her marriage or its unraveling—and therefore, no insight to the six years prior to the start of the book—it is difficult to contextualize her time at the in-patient facility. The long passages of Tendler’s harrowing diagnoses (“intense suicidal ideation, self-harm, disordered eating”) and conversations with her team of medical professionals are certainly alarming, but without knowing how they played out in her daily life, these descriptions aren’t very powerful. I have to imagine there’s a way to discuss the difficult and disorienting reality of being “known” through your husband’s comedy or the fear you would feel anticipating your looming divorce making headlines without disparaging or disclosing much about the marriage. It’s a unique perspective Tendler frustratingly withholds from us.

Chapters about growing up with her emotionally volatile mother and early relationships with older and/or misogynist men go a bit of the way toward providing us with some of the context we’re missing, and Tendler, who’s 39, is masterful at pressing on the collective bruises of adolescent romance. I was brought back to my own teenage years of trying to impress dudes in mid-tier pop punk bands, shrinking myself to fit into their lives, the sadness I feel looking back at that version of myself. Tender slips us into that early aughts mindset: “We were coming of age in a culture saturated with older man/younger women relationships…girls were expected to date older men and taught to view boys their own age as immature,” she writes.

But when she tries to tackle the patriarchy writ broadly, she falters, writing out discoveries I’d expect from a teenager who learned about feminism from Barbie, not a nearly 40-year-old woman. One example: 

“Here is the thing about men lying to women while telling them they are crazy or over reacting. 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.”

And:

“Having money (power) means you get to make a lot of the decisions that other people with less money (less power) simply have to go along with.”

These observations are not wrong in any way, but hardly feel enlightening enough to carry a memoir about men gaslighting women (a worn-out term I feel reluctant even using in 2024.) I regularly see TikTok creators wrestling with feminism in ways that are more revelatory than this.

Further underselling these (true, if a little basic) verbalized epiphanies is her inability to enact them in her life—which wouldn’t be an issue if she then grappled with that inability. She writes of two post-divorce relationships in which men disrespected her, her thoughts, and her time. But there is very little examination of her own role in these dynamics; no realization that she seems constitutionally incapable of speaking up for herself. Over and over again she punctuates her surface-level self-reflections with blanket misandry (a term she says is akin to “claiming reverse-racism”—not wrong), which is perhaps intended to be funny but falls flatter with each repetition. She 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.” It is exhausting. 

There’s ample opportunity for her to write about the lightness she feels when not dating a shitty man—but for whatever reason she doesn’t use this memoir to discuss it. We get brief insights into her art practice, an avenue many readers know her through and a space she seems to have carved out for herself independent of men. But she basically dismisses her work, describing a self portrait she takes only as “interesting.” (She told W magazine that she’d initially pitched a book of photos accompanied by short personal essays, but her editor “reimagined” it as a memoir.) There are two paragraphs in the entire memoir about what constructing decadent Victorian lampshades gave her during the tumult of her 20s; “quiet peace” and “good for my nervous system.” She writes that photography has allowed her to support herself, and I would have loved to read a reflection on that newfound financial freedom, the end of her dependence on romantic partners—but it’s glossed over in two sentences. So much real estate is given to lackluster relationships; I wish I’d read 10 fewer pages about Theo, a well-meaning but ultimately shitty boyfriend, and 10 more about how her maximalist art practice takes up aesthetic space she isn’t afforded in public. 

It is made very clear she feels strongly negative about men, especially male doctors, and believes almost any bad thing she mentions in the book is the fault of the patriarchy. But the reader who might need help matching (or at least understanding) her rage is not easily brought into the fold. Tendler’s framing of patriarchy is limited to her own life, suggesting that the extent of its ill effects is simply facilitating unequal interpersonal relationships, when in reality it has far more devastating effects—ones that more easily elicit feelings of rage. She needn’t experience the deepest depths of patriarchal harm to write about them. Long sections of  the memoir are devoted to not feeling respected or “seen” by medical professionals—undoubtedly a terrible feeling—but Tendler never convinces the reader of why that is so dangerous, even though it can be deadly. 

When we finally get reprieve from the chorus of “I hate men,” we’re nearly at the end of the book. “I don’t hate men,” Tendler writes. (News to me!) “I still want to fuck them. I still want to love them.” It’s a conundrum that many women find themselves in, but it’s not exactly memoir-worthy. There are also many complications to this feeling: Tendler describes many men who’ve cared for her and treated her well—and many women who haven’t!—but she cannot seem to adequately connect these dots.

Tendler is a good storyteller with a dark sense of humor but that doesn’t necessarily make for a good memoir. Her ex-husband’s absence might have been what made headlines about this book, but what is more glaringly missing is her inability to self-reflect and to dig into the paradoxes she find herself in, leaving the memoir feeling much lighter than the sum of its parts.