After a mental breakdown, Anna Marie Tendler turned to self-portraiture for healing
In a Q interview, the multidisciplinary artist discusses her new memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy
WARNING: This story contains discussion about self-harm and suicidal ideation.
On New Year's Day in 2021, Anna Marie Tendler checked herself into a psychiatric facility, seeking treatment for disordered eating, self-harm and suicidal ideation. When she checked out, she was in a better place, but still didn't feel totally calm.
As an artist, Tendler found that photography — particularly self-portraiture — was one the things that kept her grounded as she healed.
"I needed to remind myself that I existed," she tells Q guest host Talia Schlanger. "It redirected my energy and I found that while I was doing it, I felt very calm. I felt like I was in more of a flow state…. When I was finished with the photograph, those really difficult feelings had completely dissipated."
In her new memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy, Tendler details her struggles with mental illness, her life as an artist, and her experience with loss and grief.
She tells Schlanger that she wrote the book to show the world her inner self, as she mostly hid her struggles from people in the past.
"Even if I was going through a period of depression or I was incredibly anxious, I wasn't a person who missed work," she says. "Nothing slipped through the cracks, except for my own health."
In her memoir, Tendler writes about hiding her anger and how she'd push it aside until she exploded with rage. "The thing this book did was allow me to write about anger constructively," she says.
She also details the reality of her tricky financial situation. She didn't always make enough money from her art to pay her bills, so she was often supported by her wealthy partners.
"I, like so many other women, continuously found myself in situations where I was out-earned by my partner — and out-earned greatly by my partner," Tendler says. "What came with that was a huge amount of shame, a huge amount of feeling worthless and understanding the precariousness of my financial situation, yet at the same time, I understand there were great freedoms in that as well."
Some of those freedoms included going to graduate school and pursuing her artistic interests. She reminds Schlanger that for most of history, artists were supported by patrons, but now that financial structure isn't in place.
"It's something that I'm still wrestling with," she says. "How do I rectify this feeling of, 'OK, I'm supposed to be totally financially stable all by myself with absolutely no help,' yet at the same time, where are the bounds of the reality of that being possible?"
One thing that Tendler omits in Men Have Called Her Crazy is her high-profile relationship and divorce with her ex-husband, comedian John Mulaney.
"I wanted to write something that was beyond a divorce memoir," she says. "If I had written about that, that would have been the entire conversation. And I think I had way more to say than the one thing that people knew about me."
The full interview with Anna Marie Tendler is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Anna Marie Tendler produced by Vanessa Nigro.
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