Early & Alone #95: Men Have Called Her Crazy

On reflections, loss, and parasocial relationships

I first became aware of Anna Marie Tendler as most people likely did—through the comedy of her very famous ex-husband, John Mulaney. Mulaney frequently referenced his then-wife in his stand-up routines, casting her as a tiny firecracker who didn’t take shit from him or anyone. In one talk show interview, he relayed a story of a conversation he allegedly had with his wife in which she asks him if he has a fake persona with his parents and on stage, how does she know he’s the real him when he’s with her? His answer? “You don’t.” He played it for laughs, of course, but in retrospect, this is incredibly chilling.

I can’t remember when I first became aware of Mulaney, but I suspect it was through my ex-husband. It turns out they were both at Georgetown at the same time, though in my recollection Joe didn’t cross paths with Mulaney personally. Mulaney grew up in Chicago and attended the same high school as one of my good friends, who I’d met through Joe as well. Before the Netflix specials, we’d listen to his stand up on the internet, playing the Salt and Pepper Diner on repeat.

I found, and still find, Mulaney’s comedy to be incredibly funny. He was a charming, clean-cut, intelligent, wife guy of a comic with nuanced humor and a unique way of telling stories. Admittedly, I had a pretty big crush on him. Once, while attending a writing conference in New York several years after I’d gotten a divorce and moved away from New York, I was sitting in a tiny coffeeshop in the West Village with my friend Julie, who was also attending the conference. It was the middle of the afternoon and in strolled Mulaney and his wife. They looked like any other classy New York City couple out for an afternoon coffee. I didn’t say anything, of course, but I was completely starstruck and elated for the rest of the day, telling anyone who would listen about my celebrity sighting. I’ve had some pretty good celebrity sightings, but this one became my favorite.

I know I wasn’t alone in the shock I felt when it was announced that Mulaney was going to rehab for drug addiction and shortly after, that he was divorcing from his wife. Shortly after THAT came the news that he was dating and having a child with actress Olivia Munn. This reversal of everything I thought I knew about the charming, clean cut, wife guy comedian was head spinning for me and for many others. But all I could think about was Tendler, the tiny firecracker wife he left behind.

Of course, she was collateral damage in Mulaney’s recovery narrative, his newfound paternal bliss. He was everywhere, on new specials and talk shows and tabloids, talking at length about his addiction and recovery. It was laudable, his transparency, but it didn’t seem vulnerable. Now you could see the calculation, the veneer to his carefully curated image. I wanted to love him still, but I couldn’t, not in the same uncomplicated and adoring way.

I’d once had a parasocial relationship with Mulaney. I wasn’t alone in that, either. There were pages and pages and pages of discourse around the divorce, the rehab, the image, the new baby, the Olivia Munn of it all. But I grappled with something more personal. Somewhere in my psyche, Mulaney became like a stand-in for Joe, and Tendler for me. Clearly, Mulaney is far more charming and funny and successful and handsome than Joe ever was, and Tendler is a tiny, gorgeous artist with what I thought was probably a very different personality than mine.

Divorce is common, and in Hollywood, it’s practically a given. But I saw my own gut-wrenching divorce reflected in the dynamics of the Mulaney-Tendler divorce. Maybe not so much in the rehab, though I suspect there were some substance abuse issues at play in my own situation, but definitely in the abandonment, the infidelity, the head-spinning quickness of the new relationship paraded around everywhere, followed by the baby. Mulaney and Munn haven’t married yet, to my knowledge, but they’re still together. As far as I know, Tendler didn’t introduce Munn and Mulaney, as I introduced Joe and my friend Alex, who is his now wife and mother to his children but who was once my coworker and close friend. So, obviously, our situations are vastly different, but they are also too similar for me to shake off.

Not long after the divorce, Tendler released a set of photographs titled “rooms in the first house.” According to her website, the house in this instance is a reference to the first house in astrology, the house of the self. She describes the photographs as “these photographic works chronicle the often non-linear experiences of loss, anger, and powerlessness, as well as a reclamation of identity.” I’d thought (until today, actually) that the house was in reference to the gorgeously decorated house in rural Connecticut where Tendler now lives. In my mind, Mulaney and Tendler had purchased the house together and Tendler had decorated it with the intention of living there together, at least part of the time. But then came Covid and rehab and the divorce. So Tendler was left in the giant, beautiful house, alone with her dog, Petunia, who’d also been a mainstay of Mulaney’s comedy routines.

The house is undoubtedly central to the photographs. But so is Tendler. In one photograph, Tendler sits in the center of a room bookended by two sets of bunk beds. She is surrounded by lit candles and deer figurines, staples in many of the photos. She is wearing a black dress and has a piece of black lace tied around her eyes, like Zorro. In another, she is sitting on the floor, facing away from the camera, leaning on a slip-covered chair surrounded by dramatically floral wallpaper. Then another gorgeously wallpapered room, this one with a decorated Christmas tree and a lit fire in the fireplace, Tendler curled on a green velvet couch in her underwear. In one of my favorites, Tendler sits alone at a dining room table, wearing a long white dress and staring wistfully at the empty, set place across the table. The sadness in her face is palpable. But there’s a mirror image to this photo, this one with Tendler in the same white dress, now smiling mischeviously as she lights a cigarette from a candle stick and another Tendler, dressed in a magnificent multi-colored dress, smiles and offers another lit candle from the once-empty spot across the table. There are flowers on the table and both plates are full of food.

These photographs are beautiful because the house is beautiful and so is Tendler. She is wraith-like, skinny with a curtain of dark hair and a crooked smile. But I love them not only for their beauty but from how I feel when I look at them. I feel seen, somehow, like Tendler was able to express the broken and bereft loneliness and sadness and shock I felt when my own husband picked up and left for another woman. I saw myself in the shattered plates she throws from an upstairs window, in the way her body splays upside down on a set of stairs, in the photo of her wearing a fancy coat over a leopard-print sweatsuit beside a dumpster in melting snow struggling with Petunia’s leash.

So when Tendler announced she was writing a memoir, I pre-ordered it immediately. A few weeks before it was released, articles began to appear that warned that the memoir was not about, nor did it include, Mulaney. I was surprised and honestly, disappointed. Yes, there was a part of me that was (is) interested in the gossip of it, but more than that, I wanted to read about that desolation I’d felt reflected back to me in those photos.

I just finished the memoir, which is called Men Have Called Her Crazy because it’s centered around Tendler’s brief time in a psychiatric hospital in January of 2021, very soon before the divorce was announced. Tendler describes her time in the hospital in detail interspersed with scenes from her life, from her parents’ volatile marriage and divorce, to many scenes of Tendler being taken advantage of by older men. In the book, she is adrift, both career-wise and love-wise, making bad decision after bad decision. There is no tiny firecracker here.

Tendler is truly vulnerable in the book, unpacking not only her damaging relationships with men but her history of self-harm and disordered eating as well as severe anxiety. It’s compulsively readable and I came away from the book with an even greater affection for Tendler.

But there is a hole in the book, of course. I understand her decision not to include Mulaney, whether it be a matter of financial protection or privacy or both. Of course, she mentions him briefly, not by name, in places, when she makes reference to her crumbling marriage when she’s at the hospital or acknowledging that she’s in an incredibly privileged financial position because of her very famous husband. But there is no mention of how they met, what she loved about him, what their relationship felt like. Mostly, though, there is no specific mention to that desolation of abandonment. It’s oblique and couched in language about anxiety and self-harm and a rage against all men. But it’s not the personal and unique desolation that comes from being abandoned in a public and heartless way, the glow of healing and new love and fatherhood leaving you in the shadows, the crazy ex-wife. In a chapter about her decision to undergo a painful and harrowing IVF treatment in order to freeze her eggs, there is no reference to her emotional state of seeing her ex-husband have a baby with another woman, something I know must have affected her.

Mulaney doesn’t fit the profile of her other romantic partners in the book, most of them manipulative and messy and oblivious in her retelling. Or maybe he does, and that’s the point. What do I know?

I went into the book wanting to know more, maybe, about what had happened, and why Mulaney had left. Of course, I didn’t get that. No one will or can, not even Mulaney or Tendler. I will never know the full truth of what happened in my own marriage either, though I lived it. Because, like Mulaney said in that late show interview, we can’t and will never truly know the people in our lives, as hard as we try and as much as we trust them. How can we, when we barely know ourselves?