Anna Marie Tendler Was Surprised Women Were ‘Offended’ by Her Memoir

Anna Marie Tendler didn’t expect the backlash to her memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy.

“Publishing a memoir is not for the faint of heart,” Tendler, 39, wrote in a Tuesday, December 10, Substack post for her new COVEN newsletter. “A lot of people get mad at you — some who know you personally and a lot who don’t. 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??”

Tendler added that she was “genuinely caught off guard” by the response to the book, which hit shelves in August, because she has “cultivated a life surrounded by extremely kind, smart, empathetic, ambitious female friends.” She added that “many more people liked the book than hated it” and thanked the “freakishly nice” fans who showed up to her book tour.

When Tendler announced the memoir via Instagram in March, she described it as “a story about mental health; about being a woman; about family. And finally, about the endless source of my heartbreak and rage — men.”

The caption led many to believe that the book would recount Tendler’s highly publicized 2021 split from John Mulaney. The same month that the former couple announced their separation, Mulaney’s relationship with Olivia Munn was made public. That May, Mulaney, 42, and Munn, 44, welcomed their son, Malcolm. They went on to tie the knot this past July and welcomed daughter Méi in September.

“Everything that has transpired has been totally shocking and I think surreal,” Tendler said of her and Mulaney’s divorce during a January 2022 interview with Harper’s Bazaar. “In a way, I feel like, well, it can only go up from here, because I reached the depth of where I could go.”

Tendler defied expectations by not mentioning Mulaney by name at all in Men Have Called Her Crazy.

“I have no desire to cater to the one thing that people might know about me,” she told The New York Times in August, adding that focusing on her divorce would have been “a crutch I don’t need.”

While Mulaney was omitted, Men Have Called Her Crazy detailed several of Tendler’s past romantic experiences. Some reviewers criticized the book for centering men. Fran Hoepfner wrote for Vulture that the memoir’s “relentless gender-essentialist rehashing feels — however lived and true to Tendler’s experiences — dated and unexplored in any serious way.” Hoepfner further argued that for all Tender’s talk of “reclaiming her own story, she comes back to men over and over again.”

Jezebel’s Kady Ruth Ashcraft shared similar sentiments, writing that she found herself “begging Tendler’s ideas and anecdotes to coalesce into a thesis beyond blanket, basic hatred of men.”

Not all the reviews were bad, however. The Chicago Review of Books’ Erika Dirk called Tendler “very funny’ and “particularly adept” at exploring the way “having money emboldens men.”

In her first COVEN newsletter, Tendler said that she feels “very proud” of Men Have Called Her Crazy and encouraged those who haven’t read it yet to do so.

“I wrote MHCRC 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,” she wrote.