The artist was married to a famous comedian with a circle of celebrity friends, but then her husband left — and she checked into a psychiatric hospital. Now, she’s written summer’s most talked-about memoir. ‘On a beautiful and perfect day, I married a beautiful and perfect woman.
I wish I could live it over and over again.” That’s how John Mulaney described his wedding to the artist Anna Marie Tendler. The Emmy award-winning Saturday Night Live comedian, who more recently played Carmy’s cousin’s boyfriend, Stevie, in The Bear , and his girlfriend of four years had a 1920s-inspired wedding among the trees in the Catskills.
The American comedian Dan Levy performed the ceremony, and other friends including Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers toasted the couple. The bride wore a bejewelled Jenny Packham dress, their French bulldog, Petunia, had a flower crown made by Tendler and the pictures went viral on Instagram, TikTok and wedding Pinterest boards. The honeymoon period seemed to last for years.
Mulaney referred lovingly to Tendler in his sets and she did his make-up for his shows. That wedding was in 2014. Seven years later, Tendler checked into a psychiatric hospital.
She was 35, in the middle of her split from Mulaney and her therapist had referred her because she was at high risk of suicide — self-harming and not eating. “Going to the hospital saved my life,” she says now, smiling as she sits in her Connecticut home in an oversized white New Balance T-shirt and a thin gold necklace, her brown hair in a messy topknot. She gladly gave up her phone, wallet and computer and surrendered to an intense therapy programme.
Mulaney made a series of seismic public announcements about the unravelling of their marriage. He talked about having sought treatment for alcohol and cocaine addictions, and then in May 2021 filed for divorce. That September he said that he and his new girlfriend, the actress Olivia Munn (best known for the Aaron Sorkin drama The Newsroom ), were expecting a baby, who was born in November, six months after Tendler and Mulaney’s divorce was announced .
At the time, Tendler said: “Everything that has transpired has been totally shocking and I think surreal. In a way, I feel like it can only go up from here, because I reached the depth of where I could go.” Now, at the age of 39, Tendler has written a memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy .
She describes it as “a story about mental health, about being a woman, about family. And finally, about the endless source of my heartbreak and rage — men.”.
