Revealing the Invisible Self in "Men Have Called Her Crazy"

By Erika Dirk on August 26, 2024

Within the first chapter of Anna Marie Tendler's debut memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy, we learn two things about Tendler.

First, she has checked into a psychiatric hospital for suicidal ideation, self-harm, and disordered eating. It is early 2021, and Covid has shut down the world. Tendler's marriage is falling apart. Her beloved dog, Petunia, is suffering from serious, ongoing health issues. Tendler has started cutting again. She has stopped eating. She is consumed by thoughts of death and wanting to die. Her psychiatrist has urged her to seek help in a hospital setting, so she is here, completing the hospital's intake procedures.

She is undergoing a visual body scan to assess the severity of the bandaged cuts covering her limbs. She is peeing in a cup to check that she is not on drugs (she is not on drugs). She is getting her blood pressure taken and hearing, "Wow, you're going to live forever!" when the nurse reads how low it is. She is croaking out, "Snacks?" and enjoying a Cool Ranch Dorito, even as she worries that "enjoying a flavor-bursting tortilla chip at my hospital intake feels somehow disrespectful to the gravity of the occasion."

The second thing we learn about Tendler, almost as immediately? She is very funny.

Later in the book, Tendler describes her favorite movie, The Royal Tenenbaums, as "sad but also very funny, funny in a quiet way." This description suits Men Have Called Her Crazy quite nicely. For instance, a story about her intense pain when an ovarian cyst ruptures is lightened by a "big and embarrassing" fire truck and three unbelievably hot firemen arriving at her home, without compromising the central idea that women's pain is so often minimized or ignored. It takes a confident writer to balance sensitive subject matter with humor, and Tendler does so effectively.

Men Have Called Her Crazy progresses in chapters, generally alternating between Tendler's time in the hospital and vignettes from her past. Scenes in the hospital are narrated in present tense, while Tendler's formative encounters, many of them involving men, occur in past tense—losing her virginity to a twenty-nine year old man when she was seventeen; dating in her mid-thirties in the aftermath of her divorce; hearing she is crazy, ridiculous, overreacting, soulless, godless . . . the list goes on.

Tendler is particularly adept in her exploration of the way having money emboldens men, even the nice-enough ones, to act in ways that tip the scales of a relationship in their favor. In 2007, Tendler was in a relationship with a man she calls Theo. He had recently made millions selling a website; she was working at a hair salon, or was until he convinced her to quit and instead cut hair for him and his colleagues so she could have her own business. Unstated but known: he preferred the optics that way—his girlfriend was a business owner, not someone who worked at a salon. "The power wealth engenders is not always overt," Tendler writes, "it can be wrapped in a façade of generosity," which can even be genuine and well-meaning. Still, it earns the wealthy person the right to make decisions. After all, if someone else is paying, it would be rude to complain. The origin of the dynamic—in which the one with less becomes more pliable to the will of the one with more—may not be malicious, but the resulting inequality exists nonetheless, regardless of intentions. After Theo calls Tendler crazy for voicing concerns that a friend of his is trying to undermine their relationship, he eventually admits Tendler was right all along. Naturally, he only does so after he's been caught.

Men Have Called Her Crazy is Tendler's story, but it is not an exclusionary one. She invites readers not only to share in her experiences but to consider when they, too, have been made to feel crazy. When describing this phenomenon, she shifts to "our" and "we": "The lying, the underplaying on their side, makes us doubt our intuition and intelligence, so eventually when suspicions are confirmed, when we find out we have been correct all along, we do go batshit fucking crazy. And it is warranted."

Maybe what is crazy is the resonance and relatability of Tendler's experiences with men. The real craziness is that it all feels, well, normal. Find me a woman who's never been told by a man she's crazy for something she ends up being right about. Many readers of Tendler's memoir may very well recognize versions of their own exes, ghosts of uncomfortable encounters from their own pasts. To be clear, Tendler does not seek to universalize her experiences, and it would be a mischaracterization of, and a disservice to, her work to claim its artistic value is in its utility of acting as a mirror for the reader. But there is an exhale that comes with the recognition of shared experiences, even—and, maybe, especially—those that are painful. Being seen with clarity is powerful. Being invisible or misunderstood is excruciating. As one of the doctor's at the hospital tells Tendler early on, after three hours of testing, "There is a you inside who feels invisible to those looking at you from the outside."

Though Tendler's examination of her relationships with men forms a thematic throughline for Men Have Called Her Crazy, defining Tendler by her relationship to any man would be a mistake. Some of the most poignant chapters are those temporally situated after her time in the hospital, as she continues to focus on her own healing.

In these later chapters, Tendler writes of the end of Petunia's life in a way that is devastatingly relatable for anyone who has loved and had to say goodbye to an animal friend. She grapples with her ambivalence towards parenthood and the emotional tumult of freezing her eggs. She fears being childless will make her feel left out, even as she acknowledges how mothers also feel excluded from life. But although healing is never a linear process, or even one that can ever be truly completed, Tendler is sturdier than she was when she entered the hospital. She is lonely sometimes, but she is okay.

"It was a lot of work to get here and frankly annoying," she writes with signature wryness. But there is a payoff. Now, Tendler has gained "the luxury to experience grief and to feel deeply without crumbling."

She has also gained something else. By the end of Tendler's memoir, the version of her that was once invisible appears clearly and confidently. It doesn't matter what men have called her; Tendler knows exactly who she is, and now we do too.