Anna Marie Tendler Knows You Think Her Book Is About John Mulaney

In the summer of 2021, Anna Marie Tendler went on a first date at Ernesto’s, a Spanish restaurant on the Lower East Side, and made small talk about the menu with a man she had met online and vetted on a FaceTime call.

Then she launched into an unexpected monologue.

She told him that six months earlier, she had checked into a psychiatric hospital for suicidal thoughts, self-harm and disordered eating. Her germophobia had kept her from eating indoors since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Also, she was in the middle of a divorce.

“An absolute slam dunk,” Ms. Tendler writes of the date in her new memoir, “Men Have Called Her Crazy,” out on Aug. 13 from Simon & Schuster.

Ms. Tendler, 39, an artist whose work includes Victorian lampshades and morose photography, may be most widely known for her marriage to the comedian John Mulaney and its very public collapse in 2021. Their relationship is conspicuously absent from the book, in which Ms. Tendler refers to her marriage and divorce only a handful of times; Mr. Mulaney is never identified by name.

The book offers a portrait of a mental health crisis that is laced with dark humor, and tells the story of a woman no longer able to contain her fury toward the opposite sex. Ms. Tendler is aware that readers who come in looking for a tell-all about Mr. Mulaney may initially be disappointed — but she hopes they will connect to the version of her that they find on the page instead.

“I have no desire to cater to the one single thing that people might know about me,” Ms. Tendler said in an interview in July, at a kitschy diner about an hour from her home in Connecticut.