Anna Marie Tendler on Self-Doubt, Hospitals, and Living on Her Own Terms

My friendly relationship with writer and multidisciplinary artist Anna Marie Tendler began—where else?—in the DMs, of course. Anna Marie and I linked on Instagram earlier this year. Like the many people who follow her, I admired the woman’s brain—her eye for rollicking floral prints and candelabras aglow, and her talent for channeling pain and general mystery.  For this reason, I contacted Simon & Schuster for a galley of her new memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy, the second I knew they were out. The book is dark, feminine and important, with its absence of tabloid fodder speaking volumes. On Labor Day, I linked with Tendler to discuss the latest, most creative chapter in her highly unusual life story: publishing a knockout bestseller.

–Cat Marnell

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Cat Marnell: Okay, let’s get the huge accomplishment out of the way first. Your memoir reached #2 on the New York Times Bestseller list. This is an enormous accomplishment. How do you feel?

Anna Marie Tendler: It was really wild. Sort of surreal. I had to look at it a few times before I was like, “That’s the name of the book I wrote and that’s my name.” I have always struggled with self-doubt so making the list felt like a very tangible accomplishment. I feel proud of myself!

CM: As a writer, being a New York Times Bestseller is the Holy Grail. But I’m also, like, “Everybody works ridiculously, RIDICULOUSLY hard on their books. Like, walks-into-walls-at-the-end-of-day hard. Not everybody makes the list.” So, I feel not “bad” celebrating it, but just humbled and honored. It’s something you have your whole life, like an Olympic medal, or an NBA championship ring. My hip-hop jeweler friend was going to make me a New York Times Bestseller ring that I could look at while I typed the next book.

AMT: Oh my god I love that. Please get that ring made.

CM: Someday! I do tend to compare writing to an athletic pursuit because it is so incredibly physical. Like how running a marathon is the maximum effort of a human body, a book is the maximum of the human brain. The endurance! And connecting thoughts to your hands, and then typing them out. Not just creating hundreds of pages, but then keeping track of them. How did you find the experience of writing a book?

AMT: I think that comparison is so true. And I know you are a runner! A funny thing is that after I finished my manuscript I had the urge to do something very physical because I had just spend a year and a half doing something very mental. So, I trained for and ran a half marathon. I found the experience of writing the book very similar to athletic training, especially from my experience as a dancer—sometimes it’s amazing and you feel so in the flow of things, other days it’s the worst and you feel totally incapable. Writing is also something that requires discipline and training. I don’t mean training as in someone needs to teach you how to write necessarily, but you have to train yourself to be diligent and sit down to do the work when you can find a million other things to do besides write. I’m loving this sports analogy, by the way.

CM: I’m a new long-distance runner. I always ran fast in spurts, and I wrote that way too. Coincidentally, I am registering for the Brooklyn Half Marathon 2025, which will be my first registered race. It’s 13 miles and currently my long run is six, so we’ll see how that goes.

AMT: I ran the Brooklyn Half this past year! It’s a great race. You can definitely do it.

CM: Yes, can’t wait! Okay, so I was reviewing some press for Men Have Called Her Crazy. Architectural Digest called your taste in interior design “confident and maximalist.” Were you as confident with your vision for the book? How about your writing voice in the beginning?

AMT: I would say my confidence was mixed. In the years leading up to the book I had become a more confident person in all aspects of my life, but especially in my capability as an artist. I think that really helped with my mindset going into writing. But I knew from the outset that I wanted to tackle my thoughts, feelings, and relationship with men, misogyny, patriarchy, and mental health. I also wanted this to intersect with women and my relationships with women, which as one can glean from the book, are so much deeper, more intimate, and more tender than my relationships with men.

In terms of my voice that felt like less of a choice. It was just how I wrote. And AD is correct, my design taste is quite maximalist, but I don’t think my writing is, on the whole. I wanted to write something that had parts that were open to interpretation, that were at times confusing because I felt confused going through them. I wanted to trust the reader to do some of their own extrapolation and inferencing. I felt confident about my decision to do that.

At the same time, it’s a huge undertaking to write a book. It’s daunting and scary. Especially in memoir you’re really putting yourself out there. There were times when I thought “Can I do this?”

CM: Dude, I get it. It took me a year to start. I also was dealing with active drug addiction, but it still took me a year. I remember GOING TO BED in the middle of the day over the weirdest things I would try to write. Like…about my parents! It just felt so huge and daunting. Has your mother read the book? I’m pretty sure mine hasn’t read mine.

AMT: I just laughed out loud. GOING TO BED. YES! I had the same experience with writing about my parents. It was very important to me to represent them fairly, but also be fair to myself. I did so much editing when it came to my mom—writing, rewriting, taking things out, putting them back in, providing backstory, making sure it was obvious that we love each other despite some of the hard aspects of my relationship with her. She has read it. On first read she was very upset. And I could completely understand why. It’s a cruel trick to have a child who grows up to write a memoir! Yet, I felt I could trust that her love for me and her pride in me would eventually supersede her discomfort about the book. She is now reading it a second time, which I really appreciate! I just saw her yesterday and she told me that on first reading she missed all the good stuff, only the negative stuck out to her. I was like, “I get it! I would have had the same experience!”

My dad tried to read it and then stopped. Also, understandable. Do you have any feelings about your parents not reading your book?

CM: No, I’m super close with my parents, but I find it is best to involve my writing career as little as possible. I actually tried to take my dad to an author event and see me shine and it backfired. When I was on the mic, I said very sweetly that my dad was in the audience and pointed him out. It was this special moment for me. Then the audience Q&A opened up. Some cranky lady raised her hand first and asked, “How on earth did you escape your twenties without VENEREAL DISEASE?” I stop bringing my dad to events after that.

AMT: Wow, cool on that lady!

CM: She definitely did it on purpose. It was wild. I’m not even telling the story right. What she said was way worse.

AMT: That’s a woman who lives and feeds on hate and darkness

CM: Wait, I want to talk about a few things we had in common. First of all, I used to write Beauty and work as a Beauty Editor. You wrote a thesis, “The Lip Filler Phenomenon: Modern Medicine, Kylie Jenner, and Post-Feminist Sexuality.” LOL.

AMT: Yes!

CM: But what I want to get to is…The Hospital.

AMT: LOL that’s a segue!

CM: I’m the segue queen. We both went to the same one. In my memoir, How to Murder Your Life, there was a chapter about that hospital. In Men Have Called Her Crazy, it’s the setting for fifty percent of the book. I loved those chapters.

AMT: Thank you! I loved writing those chapters.

CM: How so?

AMT: Well, my time in the hospital was not negative (though those who read the book will see in the final chapter that I wrestle with the limitations of the hospital and how women are diagnosed in general). I felt very shy around the other girls, but I really, really like them. They were such interesting and cool people. When I left, I felt a certain melancholy that my life would likely never intersect with theirs again. So, in writing those chapters I guess it felt like I was able to spend a little more time with them. I think we sometimes have a Hollywood view of what psych hospitals/rehab’s are like and it seems scary. These women were just normal, nice, and trying to find their way. Like everyone else. What was your hospital experience like? I bet we stayed in the same house!

CM: I imagined you in the fancy house, that I forget the name of. I was in the small somewhat dumpy house for female addicts and alcoholics. But I was there in August, when it was lush and beautiful. I loved that your chapters were set in the winter, and during Covid! The Covid part made it so contemporary for me.

AMT: That’s where I was! In the all-female house for addiction. I was the only non-addict.

CM: That’s right. No, I did imagine you in there as well. In my time, all the young people wanted to watch the 2008 Olympics Michael Phelps races, and the older women wanted to watch Law and Order SVU. It was a face off. Then who IS at the fancy house?? Damn.

AMT: OMG the TV struggles were REAL. I think celebs and CEOs are in the fancy house? I should have knocked on the door.

CM: Hahahaha.

AMT: “Hi, I’m just here to poke around. Don’t mind me.”

CM: I found those chapters so comforting, and not just because I went to the same facility. I think hospitalization is a genre, and you think it will get old, and that we’ve been reading these stories since we were 12-year-old girls, and it doesn’t get old. It’s just another genre to elevate in each writer’s unique way. Memoir itself is like that. I wrote an addiction memoir, and as ambitious as I was trying to be soooo unique and special with my sentences, I was relieved and happy to have the existing structure of the addiction memoir, complete with hitting rock bottom and all that corny stuff.

AMT: I love hearing that. And I agree. Have you ever read The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington?

CM: Yes, I just read that this year. Omigod, now I see it. That book is soooo you, hahaha.

AMT: Hahahaha

CM: For anyone who hasn’t read it, it is a maximalist surreal fantasy about a woman who goes to live in hospital (as the Brits say) and it’s this insane and dark wonderland.

AMT: Someone gave it to me when I got out of the hospital and was like, “This is a book about a wacky woman living on her OWN TERMS and I think you’ll love it.” And I did!

I like what you said about existing within a genre. Someone tagged me in an Instagram post that was a photo of her bookshelf and she put Men Have Called Her Crazy between a Sylvia Plath collection and Girl, Interrupted and I felt extremely proud when I saw that.

CM: Oh, hell yeah. I love Ted Hughes’ poetry, but that man capital “T” Tortured Sylvia. Wait, can I segue?

AMT: You simply must!

CM: So, there is the absence of your celebrity ex-husband in Men Have Called Her Crazy. I speculated that the reason he is not in the memoir was because of your feminist elegance, but also possibly an NDA. You don’t have to say anything about it. But I just wanted to say—I was thinking about the way media works with books that include celebrity bits. The juicy stuff leaks to the media before the thing has come out anyway, and it all runs on Page Six and People magazine first. And so, including it is kind of pointless. By leaving it out altogether, I love how that almost became the gimmick of the book.

And it became a close read of you, your portraits come to life. Because the point of many of your most gut-wrenching portraits was that he wasn’t in them.

AMT: Thank you SO MUCH for saying this. I knew that this omission would be the most divisive thing in my book. Some people would love it and others would hate it or be mad about it. I also knew that we live in a sexist society so I was fucked either way. By leaving it out some would suggest there was a huge hole in the book, but hypothetically if I put it in I absolutely and resolutely know I would have been accused of leaning into the celebrity portion while claiming I was trying to separate myself from it. Women. Can’t. Win. So I really appreciate you and all the people who read it as a close read of me, as you put it.

CM: Let me tell you—there is one place where women can win. Starts with a B. BOOKS. These days…we are crushing it.

AMT: I AGREE!!!!

CM: Okay, lightning round: What will you read or watch on YouTube tonight?

AMT: I’m reading a book about children who remember their past lives. If I watch something it will be something reality, like Love Island.

CM: Amazing. Okay, next question. How much you do you love and appreciate your supportive and honestly, pretty unique community of online fans, on a scale from 1-10 (10 being you love them the most)?

AMT: 10! I feel very lucky. And this supportive and interesting community DID NOT disappoint at my live events. In fact, people at the venues said to me, “Wow, the people who showed up for this were so lovely and respectful.” And they were! Everyone was so nice. I really appreciate nice people.

CM: What font do you write in? What spacing do you write in (single, 1.5. double)?

AMT: Times New Roman, single spaced. BUT. I keep my page zoomed to like 240%. lol.

CM: Haha. Okay, final question! What keeps you going when you feel like giving up?

AMT: Oh wow. Honestly, I think it is having a very strong support system. I have a group of girlfriends who have been in my life for anywhere between 10 and 25 years. Amanda, my best friend in Men Have Called Her Crazy, is still my best friend today. And now her wife is one of my best friends too. All those women I dedicated my book to really know how to lift me up, and I hope I do the same for them. Also, in terms of writing, my editor Sean Manning was like a cheerleader and a fairy godfather in addition to being an amazing editor. I couldn’t have finished this book without him. Additionally, I now have faith in myself and who I am, but when that starts to falter, the women in my life are always there to remind me.

CM: Hell yeah! My best friend of 22 years is my entire lifeline.

AMT: I truly love hearing that.

CM: Okay, well, I’ll wrap this up by saying a big “congratulations” again. The fun thing about a book is that your journey with it is just beginning upon publication. A wise man, the Hollywood book-to film agent Rich Green, once said to me, “Books are like Twinkies. They don’t expire!” And it’s really true!  Years pass, and more and more people read the book. It’s a slow burn; it’s rewarding; it’s establishment in a creative community that’s really smart. It’s just a great thing to have to your name, and now you always will. I couldn’t be happier for you.

AMT: Thank you, Cat! This is so nice. I am glad we got to have a real conversation! It’s cool we both have Twinkies. I’m happy for us both and I can’t wait to see what you write next!