A review by whattaylorreads
Men Have Called Her Crazy by Anna Marie Tendler

challenging dark emotional medium-paced

2.0

I really wanted to like this book :I
This is a memoir highlighting artist Annamarie Tendler's life and experience with mental health and relationships with men. There is significant description of her afflictions, including disordered eating, cutting/self-harm, For a book that is titled "Men Have Called Her Crazy," Anna didn't give the reader a lot of concrete examples of men calling her crazy, gaslighting, or emotionally abusing her. (There is, however, a lot of examples of her mother yelling at her and using Anna as a pawn in her divorce, among other things.)  I understand not wanting to discuss your very well-known divorce from a popular, beloved comedian. Still, the exclusion of a huge chunk of her story makes the picture of her life at the point when she checks herself into a facility wholly incomplete. 
Unfortunately, in attempting to seem smart, thoughtful, or deep, I found that Tendler came across as extremely self-obsessed. She thinks that she must be an undiscovered genius, a dancer who lost a career(she was sidelined by an injury in middle school), and a struggling artist (even though she has tried several mediums while supported by the various men she is attached to, then gives up on those mediums once she is bored). 
A memoir is a tricky subject, because we only know what the author tells us from their perspective. In the last chapter, when Anna is going through her report and disagreeing with everything that she thinks makes her "look bad" and agrees with the things that she likes, that confirmation bias makes me think we are not getting the whole, true story. Again, this is a pitfall of the genre, but it should make the reader think more critically about the narrative we are being given. 
I understand that Anna would disagree with this take, but it really seems that she is obsessed with validation, especially from men. I think she hates that she craves this validation; she vehemently denies this in the last chapter and instead assumes that the male doctor who wrote the report must simply not understand her because he is a cis man. It closes with gratitude for the people in her life who have shaped her into the person she is, and explains that she has been doing better (at least, at time of writing), which is a nice capstone to the story and I enjoyed.
I think that instead of a self-indulgent book, this could have been a long-form essay for a magazine or newspaper. There were too many stories that carried no purpose to the larger story, and it should have been edited more carefully to protect the readers who also deal with similar mental health struggles. I found the tone and storytelling to be insufferable yet pushed through because I thought there must be a treasure trove of insight somewhere further in. 

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