men have called her crazy, and apparently, women will too
how anna marie tendler's memoir led to a deeply unsympathetic conversation about women + mental health
anna marie tendler’s memoir, men have called her crazy, was released a few weeks ago. for the uninitiated, anna is an artist of various mediums— though many will tell you she only became famous through her marriage, and eventual messy divorce, with comedian john mulaney. the memoir’s logline is: a powerful memoir that reckons with mental health as well as the insidious ways men impact the lives of women.
my experience of the book was that it depicts mental health struggles in a way that felt pragmatic and intentionally, messily “in-progress”— and therefore, relatable and unique, especially compared to other celebrity memoirs. my experience of the cultural dialogue around the memoir, though, was that many fixated on anna’s approach to the second topic only– the insidious ways men impact the lives of women– at the expense of the other. celebrity memoirs book club released a pretty scathing episode (by their own admission— “sorry if we were mean”) that has become a proxy for much of the terminally online Discourse™️ around the memoir. their views can be summarized by this quote from one of the hosts.
“you [anna] hate men so much because they have the power over you, and you’ve never once thought to take it back.”
most of the memoir covers anna’s voluntary stay at a psychiatric care facility, though she goes back to numerous anecdotes as a sort of “and that’s how i got here” framework. anna admits herself for self-harm, suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety, and an eating disorder.
the cmbc hosts and the internet at large dissected anna’s memoir as a reductive look at her trauma as “enough” or “not enough” to solicit our sympathy. much of their evaluation demonstrates a criteria of socioeconomic mores that are more about them and their own upbringings than anything else. they suggest anna is unserious for lingering in her abandoned childhood dreams, for being upset she was berated by a colleague at vogue (“this is what it takes to be a professional,” says cmbc, “welcome to life, bitch”), and for lamenting her depression has devolved her sense of style from one of curated gucci dresses to wearing only sweats. in many cases, her privilege precludes her from our sympathies; in others, the examples anna gives are just “not bad enough.” even her post-divorce dates are described by cmbc as “not the worst dates i’ve ever had or heard of.”
this approach extends to her more physical traumas, too. anna is critiqued for feeling frustration at dealing with the messiness of our medical care system. from simple experiences like regurgitating your symptoms over and over again (cmbc says “that’s just something you have to do”), to feeling completely ignored as a woman once you do ask for help– anna is critiqued for feeling frustration at dealing with not only the frustration of illness, but of the frustrations of our medical care system, too.
![A screenshot of a TikTok that shows the novel "Men Have Called Her Crazy" being thrown into a trash can, with a caption that reads, "I now understand why John [Mulaney] did drugs."](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f45ff97-69d3-489a-95bd-e2012a34ba6e_1179x936.jpeg "A screenshot of a TikTok that shows the novel \"Men Have Called Her Crazy\" being thrown into a trash can, with a caption that reads, \"I now understand why John [Mulaney] did drugs.\"")
i thought all of these anecdotes were resonant, hyperrealistic accounts of what it is like to lose your own personhood to your mental and/or physical health; and whether or not i felt they were “actually bad” was not really relevant. it is an account of what it’s like to literally be an unreliable, complicated, “complex female character” as it’s happening to her.
and it is a deeply self-involved practice to take care of yourself if you are mentally ill. much of the critique of anna’s memoir chalks up to anna “lacking self-awareness” for fixating on the opinions of others in the facility until she becomes completely inert (a symptom of anxiety), or as many reviews put it, “thinking about herself too much.” or for excessively talking about her thinness (which is a symptom of the eating disorder she mentions in the first few pages).
anna’s inability to go pro in ballet or acting as a child were frameworks to understand how she has spent much of her life in a quiet desperation to be special, searching for the “right” creative outlet to achieve this, only to end up in her late 30s feeling she hasn’t yet arrived. that’s a fear we all confront, and a brave thing to talk about so plainly— especially for anna, who very openly discusses it in the framework of failure. (anna has tried many different careers and artistic outlets, from hairdressing to making lampshades to, most recently, photography and writing.)
because anna is apparently a “grown woman” who needs to have it “figured out,” we cannot generate sympathy for her. another critique of the memoir was that it needed to “marinate,'“ ie anna needed to wait 5, 10 years before writing it. this indicates a public interest in resolving her mental health crisis— in hearing advice and wisdom in “how to be better” the way most celebrity memoirs are just platforms to launch wellness brands— more than to hear about the experience of dealing with it.
and because some people find comfort in comparison, we cannot draw empathy, either, because it feels good to say thank god i’m not crazy like this bitch is. (the cmbc hosts do call her crazy, or say “that’s crazy” about her behaviors, several times in their episode.) the very nature of trauma is that it is an experience you deem painful proportionate to your own experiences. trauma is a thing that happens to you outside your capacity to handle it, and therefore subjugates your personhood in some way. that can be difficult to square if your approach to comprehending any work— fiction, memoir, or otherwise— is to evaluate it squarely against your own experiences.
this memoir feels like a media literacy test for modern feminism. can you sympathize for a woman even though she is not a “perfect victim”? or if you do not see her as a “victim” at all, based on your own understanding of mental health and your own experiences? even if you feel like your own trauma is “worse”? can you care about another person’s story even though you have it all figured out? even though, maybe, your vicious critique is a symptom of your own internalized fears that you haven’t?
in short, the response was basically— anna should stop complaining about men and just have some agency, already. but also, she didn’t write enough about her ex-husband, which is why, apparently, a lot of people only paid attention to her in the first place.
![Screenshots of a TikTok reviewing the memoir, where a woman says, “you’re trying to be sympathetic to her [Anna], but at the same time the general consensus is that this book needed like 10 more years before it was released. While I think it’s really cool concept to have somewhat of an unlikeable narrator in your memoir, I do think it goes too far.”](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2c1b38f6-5694-4593-8095-9e1e252610bd_3026x2400.png "Screenshots of a TikTok reviewing the memoir, where a woman says, “you’re trying to be sympathetic to her [Anna], but at the same time the general consensus is that this book needed like 10 more years before it was released. While I think it’s really cool concept to have somewhat of an unlikeable narrator in your memoir, I do think it goes too far.”")
anna’s style captures the mundanity of taking care of yourself incredibly well. we have long romanticized womens’ mental illness in art and have used trauma– or, especially with women’s sexual trauma, have used it as a plot device to drive conflict or character. we have never made space for what it’s like day-to-day for many of us to deal with our mental health: boring!!!!! scary, but boring! and annoying, and monotonous! and a lot of phone calls and bills and notes app lists of symptoms and google calendar appointments. a thousand spades of little decisions and intrusive thoughts you push back, into the corners of your own mind instead of, as many people seem to think, out of it.
and in the age of the quotidian, of “day in the life” tiktoks and romanticizing simple pleasures, it feels like we should welcome a work that showcases this mundanity in a way that is still interesting.
i have talked before about my own dealings with depression. right around the time anna’s memoir released, i was on an annual summer pto stint, and went on a new medication to help with my own continuously declining mental health. “medication is trial and error, and this may not be the right solution. for you, it’s 50/50,” a psychiatrist warned me. “it could help you, or it could make your current symptoms worse.”
such is my luck, it was a secret third thing. the medication didn’t “make my current symptoms worse.” it gave me a set of physical and mental symptoms i have never had before that put me in a danger i was not prepared to deal with. it gave me psychosis. and it was deeply disappointing to have felt like i was making progress by getting a diagnosis and treatment at all, and then to have it make my life not only actively worse, but dangerous.
i spent much of my pto calling about five different doctors and hotlines to figure out what to do, tracking my symptoms in my phone and then repeating them over and over again until they felt like memory and not something i had recently experienced. and as soon as i was able to get a hold of my doctors and had a detox plan, and felt like i could exhale the last of the absolute terror this incident put me in, you know what i had to do? i rehearsed how to tell the people in my life about it, too.
should i be funny, so it’s less scary and awkward, or will that make it seem worse? do i tell them about all the symptoms, or just summarize what happened at a surface-level— and emphasize that it’s over, that i’ll be okay? who should know, who doesn’t, do i tell everyone a different story based on what i know about them and their own mental health? how do i answer the avalanche of how was your vacation!? queries at work honestly, and without soliciting judgment or concern from people who need to rely on me?
for loved ones involved in my life, i told them what happened clinically and involved them in my caretaking plan. by the end, i probably told the story of this incident two dozen times between doctors and loved ones, which is its own emotional exhaustion. and at work or for people i don’t know well, i went with the ~technically not a lie~ mysterious approach, telling everyone, “it was an experience, to be sure” with no further elaboration.
if hadn’t told people in my life about this incident, i wouldn’t have learned that many of them have dealt with similar mental health struggles. i wouldn’t have felt like the black hole my own mind had subjugated me to actually had a safety net, woven out of all the people and things i love, to fall down into. and i wouldn’t have had the beautiful experience of them saying, “you know you can always call me, right?” (i didn’t, and now, i do.)
the response to anna’s memoir has not all been bad, especially for people who are not chronically online. it’s definitely a certain (albeit large) corner of internet feminists who’ve drawn ire to it. or who, as cmbc put it, don’t think to complain when they do suffer and deem it not “bad” enough to complain about. “i don’t complain, like, my life is pretty awesome. i was able to make something for myself.”
real progress and de-stigmatization happens when we talk about the actual realities of taking care of ourselves. even if it’s not “tea.” even if it may scare the people in your life or makes them uncomfortable. they have a right to care about you, and a right to their own reactions and feelings about it. and yes, we have to go through hurdles to get the medical system to pay attention, too, if we’re of privilege enough to afford such care.
i don’t know what these people expected from a book called men have called her crazy, but then again, i don’t know why i expected a podcast called “celebrity memoir book club” to have a nuanced take about a topic like women’s mental health. thanks to anna’s work, i had a framework to relate my own experiences to in greater detail than many other modern works about CrAzY WoMeN have given me, and is that not the point of most art? i hope anna knows that and has seen the good parts, too. vulnerability should always be rewarded with empathy, even when it’s difficult. or even when it feels easy to use someone else’s plight to feel better about yourself.