Since the announcement, I had been looking forward to Men Have Called Her Crazy. Like so many others, I had followed Anna Marie Tendler for years and enjoyed getting to know her and see glimpses of her life on instagram — and when she revealed this memoir, I was eager to get my hands on it.

First — if you are reading the novel looking for sordid celeb gossip about her marriage; look elsewhere. This follows Tendler's two week stay in a mental hospital, where she takes the time to look back and reflect on her life, her own illnesses, and the men she's dated throughout the years + who often invalidated her one way or another.

I enjoyed her voice—she was conversational and blunt to a tee. Even as she unpeeled and dissected these sticky memories, she moved through them easily. It was infuriating to read; not because of her writing or even her actions in life, but because of the men and people she described—all too familiar types of people who gaslight, ignored, or invalidated emotions.

Her writing of the women who were in her house at the hospital was especially beautiful. She wrote with such love and care towards these women, humanizing them and their own battles in a way that most people wouldn't. It's clear that she was intentional with what she chose to share and not share.

I think her best writing was on her beloved dog, Petunia. That was the one chapter that truly made me cry and you could feel every ounce of Anna's love for her.

While I don't think is the best written memoir I've read, Tendler is compelling in her prose, and I finished it in two days.

As I was finishing up the book, I did see some reviews that I wanted to address—which I don't normally do, but there are some things to be said.

There's a lot of people who seem upset that she talks openly about relying on many of her partners for financial stability and how she has never held a real career and seem to think all of her mental illness stems from it. There are also people who seem upset that she spends so much time talking about these relationships and doesn't mention her ex-husband. But—the novel was never sold to be an expose on her marriage. And, from the title, it's obvious that Tendler was going to focus on these relationships, evaluate them as she looks back on her life. And—she herself is the first to call attention to the fact that she's had to rely financially on these men. It's not a secret to her and she's not promoting it.

I throughly feel like people are upset they didn't get what they expected and are upset that the image they projected on her is different from who she is. Which is not the author's fault.

Overall, I enjoyed the memoir a lot. And I think anyone interested in reading a woman's journey through her own mental health and relationship with men, would enjoy this. Leave the expectations at home.

There were sooo many things I found really relatable about Tendler's memoir (especially her interactions with mental health professionals). I loved her writing style, which created a good amount of tension throughout the book. Tendler seemed incredibly open about her struggles, including her time spent in in-patient treatment. However, at the end of the book, there were certain areas that were left unexplored. For example, she mentions having a brother briefly, but we don't learn anything about him or their relationship. And the biggest gray area is her marriage. Since I follow celebrity news, I know that she was married to John Mulaney. I understand why she might not have wanted to go into this because it's a sensitive area (or perhaps for legal reasons), but their breakup was pretty big news and it would have been interesting to hear her take on things. Also, obviously, Tendler doesn't owe anyone anything and it's her story to share. But because she goes into detail about every other relationship she's been in (even going back to crushes she had in high school), it felt odd that she wouldn't even mention her marriage except to say she was married, and then she wasn't anymore. I would have felt even more connected to her story if we could have learned how this impacted her growth and where she finds herself today. Otherwise, I think she's super talented, and I appreciated seeing some of my own experiences reflected on the page.

This book right away put me off. The writing is somehow both sparse and too detailed, it's emotionless and has no depth. The through line is meaningless, there's no feeling it brings to the reader. Disappointing, bland, and a whole lot of nothing.

I needed some time to think about how I felt about this memoir. On the one hand, I adore Anna Marie Tendler and was really interested in seeing how she speaks up for herself in light of all the media attention she got during and after her marriage/divorce with John Mulaney. On the other hand, I didn’t find this memoir to be that enrapturing. I saw one reviewer say that celebrity memoir tends to be either really interesting or is written in an engaging way that relates to the masses, and that this memoir didn’t fall into with of those categories - unfortunately, I agree. That isn’t to say that Tendler’s experiences have no merit or worth - they absolutely do! However, I didn’t find this to be something I wanted to engage with, nor did it give me much insight into Tendler’s personal growth after all she’s been through.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the advanced copy.

i badly wanted to like this book — and at moments i really did! — but i found it mostly to tell, not show. i spent 300 pages reading tendler's voice and i feel like i learned about her in spite of her self-reflection, not through it.

Anna Marie Tendler is a wonderful writer. This is a beautiful memoir—thoughtful, empathetic, self-aware, funny at times, vulnerable. Tendler’s exploration of her own mental health and psychiatry more broadly is informative, and her desire to understand how her relationships have made her the person she is, how all of these events are connected, is so relatable. So many women will see themselves in this book. And not for nothing, I love that John Mulaney will not find his name in it. Get yours, girl.

This is exactly what I wanted. Anna Marie Tendler has such wonderfully cool writing voice. If she hadn't early on described her experience like Girl, Interrupted I would have still conjured up that. I deeply connected with her saying her relationships with older men in the past were consensual but as she thinks back it's definitely problematic.
RIP Petunia

I don't feel right reviewing a memoir anymore these days but I love how unapologetic Tendler is with sharing her story of mental health. I think everyone assumed her ex-husband would be talked about in this but he wasn't at all and I love that for her lol

Thank you to Netgalley for an advanced copy of this book!

I found this to be a really fascinating read. This book made me angry, it made me sad, it made me laugh, and it made me appreciative. I especially apprecaited Anna baring her soul in this book and allowing others to walk through her life experiences with her. It feels as though Anna is sharing a diary in this book.

This is a good book for women who have dealt with misogyny and mental health problems. This is not a self help book by any means, but I believe it could help others to feel seen and less alone. It helps to see someone else experience what you have gone through.

I will say, if you are going into this looking for a tell all on her marriage you will be disappointed; that is not the point of this book. But if you go into it expecting to connect with another woman over shared experiences and raw soul-bearing, you will be very satisfied.

I struggle to rate memoirs but if I had to I would give this around a 4.25.

(Thank you Netgalley for the arc)

I wanted to love this book but ultimately found it confusing and frustrating. There is no denying that she is an incredible writer and the first third of the book rang the strongest for me. She has faced intense trauma and her strength is powerful and palpable. I loved her relationship with the girls in the facility and her love for her dog. However framing this book as taking her power back from the John Mulaney situation but then mentioning every other bad male relationship except his just rang baffling and false. She tiptoes around her privilege and money mostly focusing on the time she didn’t have any and not exploring what it means now that she has money in a power dynamic. I didn’t need her to give us the nitty gritty details of her famous relationship, but I think it actually looms so much larger in absentia.

- Whew, this is A BOOK. I knew next to nothing about Tendler other than her highly publicized divorce, and now after reading MEN HAVE CALLED HER CRAZY, I feel a deep kinship with her.
- Tendler’s writing is a bit removed, but her prose flows so beautifully it took me awhile to clock it. It’s somehow both clinical and deeply insightful.
- She flips between present day at the hospital and looking back at past relationships. I would have liked a bit of a sharper line drawn between the past men and current mental state, but it is all there.
- PS: There’s virtually no mention of said ex-husband. It plays somewhere between “I signed an NDA” and “you don’t matter enough to include.” Plenty of Petunia though, which made me both laugh and cry.

This is one of the best, most interesting, well thought out memoirs I’ve read in a long time. There were so many parts that felt deeply relatable and others that were inspiring. Incredible work!

1.) Incredibly readable, but somehow not fully engaging for me. She did a great job describing the events, but there was little reflection until the final (brief) chapter.
2.) Pretty sure we learned sharing our height and weight stats were a bad idea on 2012 tumblr? A very odd choice for an eating disorder/mental health recovery book.
3.) I haven’t read this much gender essentialism since 2016.
4.) I thought the therapist’s insights and her responses about her mother were the most interesting part, but the author definitely did not and they got lost in the shuffle.
5.) Petunia :( :(
6.) We get it, you have small wrists.

2.5/5 stars

Thank you to the publisher, the author, and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

A fantastic memoir. Anna is unapologetically honest about her mental health and inpatient experience, about loss and grief, love. A very emotional read!

I loved this. I related so much to the feelings in this book, both towards men and about myself. What a triumph of a memoir!

(Although, you won’t find juicy celebrity gossip here!)

This book is so good! It is well written but also heartbreaking to know what the author has experienced. I have been saying this often, but i would love to see this book dissected in a women’s studies class; there’s so much here. Thank you to the publisher for inviting me to read this book!

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the ARC. I was so excited to get my hands on this and get to know Tendler better.

Imagine your best friend's impossibly cool, mysterious, and creative older sister wrote a memoir, giving you a snapshot of her life and maybe a glimpsse into her unknown mental health struggles. You realize just how much you didn't know about her beyond the anecdotes that her husband regaled large audiences with or what you could glean from her art.

The book opens as Tendler, recognizing she's in crisis, checks herself into an in-patient mental facility. From there, it vacillates between her descriptions of day-to-day treatment at the facility and seminal moments and relationships that affected her life, her outlook, her personality.

I went into it knowing that it wasn't going to be about John Mulaney or her relationship with him. And, while I respect that none of us are owed the details of her marriage, it's the elephant in the room. It's hard to imagine that her marriage--the relationship that preceeded her stay in treatment, didn't have as profound an effect and wasn't worth mentioning. Maybe it was intentional. But, she's so honest about so much so it's noticeable that she's not willing to be honest with readers about that. Not that she's lying. She just omits it entirely save for a couple of vague references. I think about how honest she was about her mom and how painful that must have been to write, how painful it had to be for her mom to read. She's willing to be brutally honest about her mom and herself, but not her relationship with her ex-husband?
It creates this void in the book that's hard for the reader to overcome.

The ending doesn't exactly offer a resolution as she dissects the diagnoses and notes. Books don't have to follow a traditional arc to reach a resolution, and I think it's possible that someone completely unaware of her might pick this up and really appreciate such a personal account of mental health. A lot of people (who are aware of her and who she was formerly married to) are going to struggle with what she leaves out, though.

Wow. This book was simultaneously heartbreaking, cathartic, insightful, vindicating, and so much more.

I waited for the audiobook to release before doing my readthrough, and I'm glad I did because listening to Anna narrate this was an experience -- possibly one of the best reading experiences I've had to date.

Being a woman, or a person raised socialized as a woman, in a patriarchal world is unsafe and honestly maddening. We are conditioned to be quiet, to not take up space, to make others comfortable even to the detriment and harm of ourselves, we're taught to normalize our pain, to never be an inconvenience -- and it's so much worse for those of us who are queer and melanated. And sometimes it's not until we have some kind of mirror held to our faces in media like this that we can truly unpack the reality in which we live and the patterns and dynamics we fall into that uphold it. I'm thankful for the vulnerability that went into this, it was obviously a labor of love and I'm glad she was brave enough to share it with the world.

I loved her method of storytelling, intertwining stories of her past with her more contemporary experiences. And I know that many will likely complain about her memoir not focusing on her divorce, but those who will are completely missing The Point and are doing themselves a major disservice.

This is a book I will think about at least once a day for the rest of my life.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing this eARC.

Men Have Called Her Crazy is a memoir that discusses the author's experience in a psychiatric hospital and reflects on moments in her life which lead to and resulted from this experience.

I always find it difficult to rate memoirs lower than a 5 stars, but I'm happy to say this one feels deeply deserving of a high rating. Tendler is open, honest, and vulnerable, and though her individual experience is not relatable to all, she ties much of her experience to the broader, more universal experiences of women in society, and the pressures and pitfalls we face. And, despite everything that she does go through, difficult and harmful as it was, Tendler ends the book on a hopeful and positive note. It is clear that this memoir was written very intentionally, painting a realistic and nuanced portrait of mental health without coming off as pessimistic or dark.

Also, props to Tendler for not mentioning Mulaney by name once. My favorite thing about this book is that there is a person here who is so, so much more than the men in her life would ever paint her to be.

Absolutely loved this memoir! Anna beautifully crafted this story focused on a period of her life, not all that long ago, surrounding her own mental health journey. The chapters switching between her younger years to now was so fluid. I love how direct she when talking about her mental health, and all of the realizations she came to throughout the journey.