Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by rocknrollbookshelf
Men Have Called Her Crazy by Anna Marie Tendler
5.0
To all my fellow messy, elder millennial women, the ones who think/love/talk/feel/ARE "too much," please read this book. This is our Bell Jar with a -- well, not *happy* ending, but a resolute ending. An ending where the author moves forward, actively learning to be okay.
Tendler puts a strong, unapologetic voice to the experiences of so many of us over-thirty-fives who came of age during an in-between-time of societal emotional intelligence. We never developed the defiant toughness of Gen X, nor the self-aware boundaries of Gen Z. We knew that there was something deeply wrong with the things we experienced, but the language for accutately describing them (and tools for healing them) wasn't available to us until much too late to mitigate their painful and stultifying effects.
I'm surrounded by fellow fortyish women with a few years of much-needed therapy under our belts, finally getting out from under the crushing weight of the *wrongness* of so much that we endured as normal. Are we healed, fixed, over it? Not quite, but we at least understand that we are not innately the problem. We're finally living the adult lives we were meant to start living two decades ago, and it might be late, but it's certainly not little.
I devoured this one in less than twenty-four hours in the kind of manic reading-haze where you're like "Can I hold one hand out with my Kindle while I shower? Can I prop it up by the mirror while I apply eyeliner?"
Thank you, Anna Marie Tendler, for so eloquently putting the rage, the anxiety, the overwhelm, the melancholy, to paper as well as expressing the strength and love it takes to fight for your own okayness.
Tendler puts a strong, unapologetic voice to the experiences of so many of us over-thirty-fives who came of age during an in-between-time of societal emotional intelligence. We never developed the defiant toughness of Gen X, nor the self-aware boundaries of Gen Z. We knew that there was something deeply wrong with the things we experienced, but the language for accutately describing them (and tools for healing them) wasn't available to us until much too late to mitigate their painful and stultifying effects.
I'm surrounded by fellow fortyish women with a few years of much-needed therapy under our belts, finally getting out from under the crushing weight of the *wrongness* of so much that we endured as normal. Are we healed, fixed, over it? Not quite, but we at least understand that we are not innately the problem. We're finally living the adult lives we were meant to start living two decades ago, and it might be late, but it's certainly not little.
I devoured this one in less than twenty-four hours in the kind of manic reading-haze where you're like "Can I hold one hand out with my Kindle while I shower? Can I prop it up by the mirror while I apply eyeliner?"
Thank you, Anna Marie Tendler, for so eloquently putting the rage, the anxiety, the overwhelm, the melancholy, to paper as well as expressing the strength and love it takes to fight for your own okayness.