This post was originally published on Audible.com.
Even if you haven't seen multimedia artist Anna Marie Tendler's haunting, grimly beautiful photography collection "Rooms in the First House" or her fine textile work specializing in Victorian lampshades, it's quite likely you know her name. It's possible even still, that despite this awareness, that name is tethered to a since-dissolved marriage, a relationship whose end was endlessly mulled over in the public consciousness.
It's part of the strength and appeal of her debut memoir, , then, that Tendler pointedly refuses to go the route of dangling tantalizing details or tell-all scandals. Instead, she offers listeners a deeply intimate recollection of inpatient treatment for mental health struggles including anxiety, self-harm, depression, and disordered eating. Throughout, she considers the ways in which men have altered her perception of self and reality, punctuating the narrative with painful moments that became mounting traumas. Shortly after the book's release, Tendler joined me to share her thoughts on writing, her story's unique format, and the advice she'd give her younger self.
Alanna McAuliffe: Prior to the release of Men Have Called Her Crazy, much of your art has been in the visual medium, including photography, textile work, and cosmetology. How did you find the process of excavating, writing, and then narrating such deeply personal stories from your own life in the literary medium compared to these other formats?
Anna Marie Tendler: With writing, I really felt the weight of language. I believe language is so important. It can do both beautiful and destructive things. In visual mediums you can rely on ambiguity of meaning, but it is much harder to do that with words. The excavating didn’t feel difficult. All those moments were right there waiting for me to take them from the liminal to the concrete. They were things I had already worked through and processed, so while I was able to embody the emotions of them on the page, they weren’t triggering to write down.
But I wanted to get the language right; that was important to me. I also wanted to trust the listener to make some of their own inferences, much like they would when taking in a visual-based work, like a photograph. I think it’s really important to trust the listener to extrapolate some of the book’s meaning on their own. Narrating the audiobook was an absolute stress-free joy. I loved it! I got to retell these stories exactly how I heard them. It was truly so fun.
"I wanted to show my mistakes, my missteps, my wrong turns, my misguided assumptions, my mental health struggles, and my lessons learned in hopes of portraying womanhood in all its messy reality."
