Anna Marie Tendler addressed criticism of her memoir Men Have Called Her Crazy.
The book was published earlier this year and explores Anna’s 2021 stay in a psychiatric hospital. Notably, it does not discuss Anna’s ex-husband, John Mulaney, by name.
Some found the centering of men to be troubling — especially given how often Anna has, as she explores in the book, changed jobs and become financially dependent upon her partners. As one popular Goodreads review put it, “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.” A reviewer for Jezebel said that she found Anna’s comments on patriarchy to be what you’d “expect from a teenager who learned about feminism from Barbie, not a nearly 40-year-old woman.”
In the first edition of her new Substack newsletter Coven, Anna looked back on the August release of her memoir. “Publishing a memoir is not for the faint of heart. A lot of people get mad at you – some who know you personally and a lot who don’t,” she wrote.
She continued, “Naively I had prepared myself for incels to come at me for what I had written. But it turned out to be other women who were deeply offended by me. Some might say unnecessarily offended??”
“I have cultivated a life surrounded by extremely kind, smart, empathetic, ambitious female friends, so this turn of events genuinely caught me off guard. I am lucky though, many more people liked the book than hated it. I felt very welcomed by the literary community, any of whom I’ve remained in contact with both over the internet and IRL. I believe that when you rile people up with your work, you’re on the right track,” the photographer added.
“I wrote MHCHC because I had something I needed to say about mental health and about patriarchy, having spent the last five years in a near-constant wrestling match with how it defines so much of the world and how it has shaped my life personally. Patriarchy hates women,” she wrote. “It turns women against each other with its façade of scarcity by relying on us to tear each other down, to participate in judgment of one another, to be envious and jealous. Patriarchy holds women to a standard that makes no room for messiness or imperfection. MHCHC, I hope, offers a different approach to the female experience.”
So, have you read Anna’s book? What did you think?
