Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir
Relationship rubberneckers who have directed their fury toward Mulaney have been anticipating a scathing tell-all that would reduce him to ash, and provide retribution and closure for their spurned heroine. They will be very disappointed ... Readers are, of course, not owed the details on the dissolution of any marriage, parasocial fandom notwithstanding ... But this omission gives us an incomplete picture of Tendler’s suffering ... The great relief of this book: Everyone is rooting for her. It doesn’t mean it adds up to a greater truth, though ... But reading about her bad relationships that were not her marriage, which presumably had an enormous impact on her mental health, makes that feel a little hollow.
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Outward rage clouds the memoir’s best and brightest moments ... What’s always been impressive about Tendler’s work...is her attention to detail and aesthetics ... She’s clearly proud of the skill she’s shown, but it’s hard to grasp what the art ever means in her life because such asides are derailed — as she is — by memories of men. She undercuts the artistry of the memoir itself by dredging up the past, even when it’s unremarkable ... While Tendler’s confessional writing style is reminiscent of a long email from a friend or dishy voice note, her memoir is anything but a gossipy tell-all ... Yet for all that the memoir touts itself as Tendler reclaiming her own story, she comes back to men over and over again — focusing, blaming, and elucidating factors that feel neither original nor compelling.
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In mordant, frank prose, she weaves interludes from her past...into the account of her psychological breakdown ... Appears to have the uncanny shape of a 21st-century art form: the NDA memoir ... The book’s uneven structure starts to falter—there are giant pieces of her story that she doesn’t, or possibly can’t, reveal, and their absence risks turning her writing into negative space, when it should be front and center.
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