Fifty pages into her debut memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy, multidisciplinary artist Anna Marie Tendler describes a recurring dream. In a small, low-lit room that “resembles a detective’s office from a 1940s noir film,” Tendler and a faceless man argue over whether or not she’s crazy. They go back and forth—he says yes, she says no—before he laughs and vanishes. Then, the door disappears, leaving her trapped inside. Tendler wakes in a psychiatric hospital where, a day earlier, she checked herself in for suicidal ideation, self-harm, and disordered eating. But when she recounts the dream, she describes it to the reader—not a therapist. The dream itself needs no interpretation. As Freud might say, all its latent content—the unconscious urges the dream stutters to express—is right there on the surface.
Tendler wants you to know that she is deeply distrustful of men. She retains a litany of ways “men have asserted their power over [her]” and the ways she has “fought to be equal or conversely sublimated [herself] to keep peace.” At the hospital, she requests the female-only residence because she doesn’t want to even look at men. When the only other person in a hospital yoga class is a man, she is “furious.” Tendler is an amiable narrator, nervy and bright, who eventually cuts her unrelenting stance with a moment of self-reflexivity: “Perhaps I shouldn’t be so quick to pathologize everything men do as merely a failing of being male,” she says, wary of doing the very thing she so detests in them—“though men do make it difficult not to.”
