By Leslie Price
Everyone has a bad-relationship story, but in Men Have Called Her Crazy, Anna Marie Tendler fills an entire book with them. “Bad” is perhaps too banal a word for the behavior she describes — disappointing, coercive, damaging, and illegal also come to mind.
Tendler’s memoir treads territory that feels familiar. It reminds me specifically of two pieces that lit up the internet a few years ago: Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person,” and the polarizing Aziz Ansari date gone wrong essay published on the short-lived website Babe.net. The book is about Tendler’s time in a psychiatric facility, but it’s also, in her words, about “the endless source of my heartbreak and rage — men.”
In all three, a young woman navigates consensual, yet terrible, sexual encounters with men. Cat Person is excruciating; the man is mediocre, a bad kisser, and much older. The women in both “Cat Person” and the Ansari story struggle to figure out how to turn down sex. In the mind of Roupenian’s protagonist, “insisting that they stop now, after everything she’d done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled and capricious, as if she’d ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back.” Men’s feelings must be considered.
Tendler is a beautiful, artistic brunette who learned how to do hair and makeup before branching out into fine-art photography, Victorian lampshade-making, and writing. She also learned, over the course of her life, how to play a supporting role in her relationships with men. Yet even in her attempt to step into her own light with this book, she’s being pushed into the shadow of a man: Her ex-husband, comedian John Mulaney, who for the record is not in the book (but is the focus of every single review of it).
Tendler and Mulaney’s relationship was high-profile, and so was their separation. Tabloid coverage followed Mulaney in particular; after a stint in rehab, he left Tendler and eventually had a child with actress Olivia Munn. The book was written during the beginning of this upheaval in their marriage.
There are lots of uncomfortable scenes. In an early chapter set during her high school years, an older boy stops by her house unasked, then kisses and grinds on her before leaving. “The kiss was hard and messy and unpleasant,” she writes. “I wanted it to stop, but I also didn’t. It was the validation I needed, that I’d never gotten from guys at school.”
Tendler describes how she became good at being what she thought men wanted her to be. An unrequited affection for another boy “cemented my role in relationships as a pleaser, a convincer, a girl who, well into adulthood, would contort and conform to the desires of a man, overlooking his easy dismissal and dampening her self-worth, all to be loved.” Her relationships are replete with uneven power dynamics; the men are older, or richer, or both.
I can barely remember the contours of my old relationships, but Tendler is cursed with a combination of incredible recall and a highly sensitive personality. “I have a sort of photographic memory for the ways men have asserted their power over me, the ways they have treated me poorly, and the ways I have fought to be equal or conversely sublimated myself to keep peace,” she writes. The book is a thrumming, tormented embodiment of the Andrea Dworkin quote about how women resist feminism “because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny that permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.”
“Everything I explain to him feels vague, like it could be something, but it could also be nothing,” she says of her conversation with a (male) psychiatrist upon check in to the psychiatric hospital for disordered eating, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. “Is any of it abuse? Is it kids simply exploring sexual boundaries they don’t understand? Is it adult men simply exploring sexual boundaries they are conditioned to disregard? I feel stupid recounting these experiences in all their un-concreteness. I do not know what they mean. Maybe they don’t mean anything.”
I didn’t keep track of how many times Tendler writes about how much she despises men in her book, but it was a lot. Being disappointed by men, being afraid of them, even hating them, but still dating them. It’s enough to make you wonder: What are these men thinking? Do they think we like this? Do they care that we don’t? Complain enough about the indignities we’ve normalized in heterosexual relationships, and maybe people will indeed call you crazy.
The must-read newsletter for adult women. Join us!
Your Email
Subscribe