MEN HAVE CALLED HER CRAZY ★★☆☆☆ / ROOMS IN THE FIRST HOUSE ★★★★★
sean manning, president and publisher at simon & schuster when i catch you sean
The market demands a self-pitying traumaporn woman memoir, so Connecticut-based visual artist Anna-Marie Tendler has one to sell us.
We all knew about her celebrity marriage. We smoked pot with our college friends and laughed at stories about her, we referenced them with our own spouses, we even scraped together a collective $10 million of our pocket change in the hopes that we would get to hear some more. Many of us felt we knew her, even, in some kind of personal way, and the famous husband too. What a nasty shock it was for us to find out that stuff was just made-up for TV!
With Rooms in the First House, Tendler announced herself. She would no longer be the subject, the nameless wife, the shy and silent muse of some fucking man. She was the artist, she held the camera, her point of view was on display, her particular aesthetic fetishes and whims. And that lying, cheating, good-for-nothing sonofabitch would feature only by the implication of her beautiful suffering. The rage. The grief. My goodness. These photographs comprise a body of work both lyrical and operatic, and evoke such a specific effect: heartbroken, isolated, trapped in an endless COVID winter day. We know exactly how Tendler is feeling, because she makes us feel it, too.
Tendler’s multi-layered technical skills are equally impressive. The images combine the artist’s years-long studies of textiles, interior design, dance, and cosmetology into a unique series of portraiture and still-life. That she produced them during a time when her private business was splattered all over the tabloids for the ghoulish entertainment millions of bored strangers only adds to their considerable power. In one of my favorites, Tendler has constructed a dress out of ropes of yarn, and thrown part of it over the branches of a tree like the viscera of an animal caught by a shrike. In another, she sits at the foot of her bed with her shoes half-off, starring, stunned, into the middle-distance, like a forgotten doll. Rooms in the First House is a masterpiece frankly, transmogrifying Tender’s life experiences and pain into something playful and fantastical, something extraordinary.
I want so badly to touch a big, glossy book of these photographs printed on heavy paper. More than that, I want to put them in my mouth.
Scuttlebutt is, that’s exactly the book that Tendler first pitched: photographs with a couple of essays as accompaniment. How tedious, then, to instead read the origins of these poetic, ensorcelling images rendered so literally in prose. I sure wish her editor had not talked her into writing a memoir instead.
The details of Tendler’s biography are, on the whole, pretty unexceptional. As a little girl, she was good at ballet but not very good; as a young woman, she cut other people’s hair for a while. One of those people was her ex-boyfriend, and the arrangement made her feel weird, so she stopped. Okay. In the present timeline, she makes phone calls and has meetings with doctors and therapists, sees some turkeys, drives out of her care facility and then back again, and walks from one side of the hospital campus to another. Okay as well. I don’t mean to sound dismissive of her very real pain— most of the memoir takes place while Tendler is close to death from a combination of disordered eating and suicidal ideation. But she is nevertheless an incredibly wealthy and privileged woman, and that rumored NDA keeps her from getting into the real red meat: the demise and immediate aftermath of her famous marriage. This may account for the animosity some have expressed after finishing the memoir: Tendler can’t delve into the true source of her distress, so what remains reads as so much insignificant white woman whining. Details of her divorce have made for a book, maybe not a very meritorious one, but a juicy read nevertheless. The remainder of her personal life, though, is simply not interesting enough to sustain a narrative.
The best parts of Men Have Called Her Crazy are the ones that speak directly to the photographs in Rooms in the First House, a tantalizing glimpse of the art book that might have been. We get an origin story for the potted money plants in some of the images (gifts from other women in the hospital!) as well an account of how Tendler acquired all of the various trades of which she was only a Jack before combining them to such extraordinary result. There’s nothing wrong with Tendler’s voice or prose, but descriptions of, say, her clothes or her beautiful home, that “cocoon of aesthetic beauty,” just make me want to close the book and look at the pictures instead.
When Tendler was a girl, she wore Doc Martens with brushed velvet and faced humiliating rejection from boys who liked girls who wear Abercrombie & Fitch. Same as it ever was. These and other facts about her are so much less interesting than her point of view and aesthetic sensibility. It disturbs me, then, that her publishers would rather package and sell not a book of Anna-Marie Tendler’s artwork, but Anna-Marie Tendler herself. I guess only in some utopian post-capitalist future can we hope for a photographer to release a book of photography.
Men Have Called Her Crazy is available for purchase from Simon & Schuster.
Rooms In The First House can be accessed for free on the world wide web.