Anna Marie Tendler: Art, Memoir, and the College Humor Connection

Anna Marie Tendler is an American multimedia artist known for her work in photography, makeup and hairstyling, and textile crafts, with a notable specialty in handmade lampshades. She is also the author of Pin It!: 20 Fabulous Bobby Pin Hairstyles and The Daily Face: 25 Makeup Looks for Day, Night, and Everything In Between!. More recently, she penned the memoir Men Have Called Her Crazy, inspired by a stay at a psychiatric hospital in early 2021 and the events preceding and following that moment.

Early Life and Career

Born on June 9, 1985, in Bethel, Connecticut, Anna Marie Tendler is Jewish. After graduating from high school, Tendler studied hairstyling at Vidal Sassoon and the Make-up Designory, and then photography at Parsons School of Design at The New School before dropping out. She later received her bachelor's degree from The New School in writing and psychology.

After dropping out of college her freshman year, Tendler began work as a hairstylist and makeup artist in New York City and was an early pioneer in the world of online beauty gurus.

Marriage to John Mulaney and Public Image

Tendler married comedian John Mulaney on July 5, 2014, at the Onteora Mountain House in Boiceville, New York. Their friend, comedian Dan Levy, officiated the ceremony. Mulaney often mentioned Tendler and their French Bulldog Petunia in his stand-up routines, cultivating a public image of Mulaney as a relatable, loveable gentleman. He also made a point in his comedy pretty often that he did not want kids, and he joked about the pressure and expectations to have children. He posted frequently on social media about how much he loved and admired his wife. His jokes kind of painted Tendler as really tough and difficult, and he portrayed himself as the passive, “Yes, honey,” husband.

One famous joke about Tendler is when Mulaney says that she told him before his comedy routine, “Just don’t tell everyone that I’m a bitch and that you don’t like me,” but he says, “I would never say that."

Divorce and Aftermath

Tendler and Mulaney's separation was announced in May 2021. Instead of a spit-polished PR statement from the couple saying that it was mutual, the public gets a brief, yet heartwrenching, statement from Anna Marie Tendler, in which she says, "I am heartbroken that John has decided to end our marriage.” In September 2021, two months before John Mulaney’s first born came into the picture, he announced to the public that he was having a baby with Olivia Munn.

On “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” John Mulaney said, “I went to rehab in September, OK? Anyways, here’s the news when he went into his 60-day program in the end of December. But yeah, October. John shared with the public: “I move out of my home from my ex-wife. Then, in the spring, I went to Los Angeles and met and started to date a wonderful woman named Olivia. I got into this relationship that’s been really beautiful with someone incredible. Munn would later admit, “It was a surprise pregnancy. I did not have any doctor team ready. I had no idea.”

The bundle of joy is born and John Mulaney almost immediately starts sharing loving posts, photos, and videos of his new girlfriend and son, Malcolm.

Meanwhile, Anna Marie Tendler, is out of mental health rehabilitation and sharing harrowing photography self-portraits that depict her alone, pale, and crying in a large, empty house. On Mother’s Day, John Mulaney shares an image of him kissing Olivia Munn after giving birth to their son, and Tendler in turn shares a photo of her feeding their dog out of a bottle with a blindfold on. In her portraits she looks unhealthy and emaciated and you can see scars from self-harm.

Mulaney came out with a new comedy special in 2023 called Baby J. In Baby J, he opened up about the fact that he had been using essentially throughout his whole career and only got sober in 2020 when he went to rehab.

Men Have Called Her Crazy

Tendler's memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy, was released in 2024. The book starts with Tendler checking into a rehab facility in New England due to suicide risk. The book then alternates between her odd-numbered chapters detailing her experience in rehab and even-numbered chapters sharing stories from before rehab, starting with when she was a teenager living through her parents’ divorce when she first started cutting herself.

The book grapples with two competing narratives. On one hand, this memoir reads as written for and about the author herself, concerned primarily with her emotional recovery. However, the laser-like intensity with which she beams in on the lifetime of mistreatment she’s received from various “fucking men” inevitably detracts from that project. The stories and decisions Tendler collects during times of relative independence, even singledom are much richer and more interesting than her hyperdetailed descriptions of past relationships, starting in her high school days and ending with various unsuccessful and fairly insignificant mini-relationships with men she met on dating apps after her hospitalization.

Themes and Content

Men Have Called Her Crazy covers a lot of ground. Men have called Tendler crazy, they’ve driven Tendler crazy, and they have treated her as if she was crazy-usually after the first blush of emotionality. And then there’s the reality of being in a psychiatric hospital. But does that mean she’s “crazy,” or just an individual undergoing a period of crisis?

At the hospital, Tendler’s revulsion with men is so pronounced that she goes so far as to request to stay in one of the all-female houses on campus. “I absolutely refuse to be around men,” she writes. “I don’t even want to look at them,” she informs the therapist who referred her there; later, she tells a different doctor that she’s “grown increasingly angry at men’s mere existence.”

Sandwiched between these scenes from her hospital stay are memories. While these jump around in time, including to her posthospital success as an artist after a lifetime of struggling creatively, they offer, namely, a comprehensive history of men, the ones who have either called or driven her crazy, or both. If nothing else, the book provides a litany of problematic boyfriends and lovers.

Read also: A Look at Anna University

Tendler’s early romantic experiences were mostly negative, and she catalogs every slight as though recounting events to a psychological professional, employing a careful, sometimes overexplanatory writing style. Tendler may not always be a particularly artful writer, but she’s an unwaveringly thorough one: “I have a sort of photographic memory for the ways men have asserted their power over me, the ways they have treated me poorly, and the ways I have fought to be equal or conversely sublimated myself to keep peace,” she explains. True to her word, she assembles a kind of scrapbook.

Omission of John Mulaney

Many had wondered if-perhaps even hoped-the book would offer a tell-all about life with its author’s famous ex-husband, the comedian John Mulaney. Yet those looking for celebrity-sized gossip can turn back to the shelf. Tendler never refers to Mulaney by name and describes virtually nothing of their time together-there are only a few necessary points where the narrative makes it necessary for her to mention “my husband,” “my marriage,” and later, “my divorce.” It takes a decisive writer to leave a husband of eight years out of her memoir. Whether this is an act of vengeance, indifference, or a non-disparagement clause is unclear. In any event, far more ink is spilled on the life and death of her beloved French bulldog Petunia, who she used to wheel around New York City in a baby carriage.

Some reviewers and readers called the choice to exclude her famous ex-husband an artistic decision. Others believe that there is extensive evidence in the text that she was silenced, not silent.

Critical Reception

Sheila McClear notes that even with the book’s Mulaney-sized omissions, an extroardinary amount of page space remains devoted to the shortcomings of subpar guys. Yet Tendler is the one who compels, not the men-and her memoir is most engaging when she writes about herself. Wildly creative, she recounts a life of searching for ways to express herself: first through ballet, then a stint at the Vidal Sassoon Academy for cosmetology after high school (she completes the program but fails the state board exam), then photography and psychology classes at the New School (she drops out after a year, only to complete her degree later). After that, she works as a shampoo girl in a salon, makes a half-hearted attempt at another degree in art education, and “cut[s] hair illegally,” an undertaking encouraged by boyfriend Theo so she could be her own boss and quit the salon. Next, she teaches herself to create ornate Victorian lampshades after buying “an instructional DVD off Etsy, recorded from a VHS made in 1992.” The lampshades are made available to her social network and a business is born.

McClear writes that for readers paying attention to the woman behind the breakups, such creative leaps-and their subsequent success-shouldn’t come as a surprise. When we first encounter Tendler during her hospital stay in the winter of 2021, she’s in the middle of earning a master’s degree in costume studies at New York University, which she hopes might lead to a career in museum work. She has just finished a yearlong position working for a textile conservator. She has also completed an art project of her own-redecorating her postdivorce Connecticut house in obsessive, exquisite period detail, turning it into “a sort of haunted Victorian dollhouse.” Both emotionally and visually, Tendler is a maximalist.

The College Humor Connection

In the even-chapters, that delve into Tendler’s past, we learn that after her breakup with the punk artist, Anna moves to New York, gets an apartment with her best friend, works at a hair salon, and takes some college classes in art history. I’m not trying to get sued so I’ll just say that users on Reddit have speculated that Theo is actually the founder of College Humor, Ricky Van Veen. But there is a woman openly interested in Theo named “Rachel.” Users on Reddit speculate that Reachel is Julia Allison, who is like an influencer or something. And this bitch Rachel tells Anna at a party that Theo doesn’t want to date a hairdresser who lives in Queens. Anna goes to parties at Theo’s place in the Hamptons and he encourages her to quit the salon and start cutting hair freelance so that he can tell people his girlfriend owns a business instead of telling people that she cuts hair. She cuts Rachel’s hair and Rachel refuses to pay her, which Theo thinks is funny. Anna is irritated by everyone in the Hamptons; she calls them posers and thinks they are deeply uncool. After more than a year together, when Anna tells Theo that she can’t go to the Hamptons again because she has to stay in the city and work, he says that he will pay her to clean his six-bedroom mansion so that she can stay.

Then Rachel is like, not me though, I pay for myself and I’m also chill and different. If you didn’t live through the millennial, not-like-other-girls, pick-me era, you are so fortunate. Anna freaks out in the airport and tells Theo, “I can’t believe that you have refused to stand up for me, you have repeatedly told me that I’m overreacting, you have continuously put me in social situations with this woman, you pretended you didn’t have a previous relationship. Not a single time have you considered my feelings. You were only worried about protecting yourself and not losing her attention.” And she calls him a liar and storms off while everyone in the airport watches the whole ordeal.

Then Tendler writes: “Here is the thing about men lying to women while telling them they are crazy or overreacting. 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.

Artistic Pursuits

Anna becomes a makeup artist, she works on sets all day. I guess that it was around this time that she met John Mulaney, but she doesn’t tell us that. There is a story about a crazy woman mistreating Anna on set and she decides to quit being a makeup artist. She starts making lampshades. And it’s around here that things start getting really vague. In 2013, Anna gets a puppy named Petunia. She writes about this dog with so much love. She got Petunia with John Mulaney, I know that from photos of him with the puppy and from his standup, but he is still conspicuously missing from these chapters. She takes Petunia to a “dog communicator,” so as a reader of course I’m thinking: Okay, so she has money now. And if you follow celebrity gossip then you know why: at this point she’s already married to a hyper-successful famous comedian. But if you came to this book with a blank slate you would think: Did I miss something? Cuz two chapters ago she was washing hair fo…

Photography

After leaving the hospital, Tendler begins taking the haunting, witchy, and melancholy self-portraits she is now known for (one of which serves as the cover of her book), using her magnificently decorated house as a backdrop. After being asked to exhibit at the Other Art Fair, a hub for emerging artists, she finds success in fine art photography.

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