NEW CANAAN, CONN.- In the summer of 2021, Anna Marie Tendler went on a first date at Ernesto’s, a Spanish restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, 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,” Tendler writes of the date in her new memoir, “Men Have Called Her Crazy,” out Tuesday from Simon & Schuster.

Tendler, 39, an artist whose work includes Victorian lampshades and morose photography, may be most widely known for her marriage to comedian John Mulaney and its very public collapse in 2021. Their relationship is conspicuously absent from the book, in which Tendler refers to her marriage and divorce only a handful of times; 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. Tendler is aware that readers who come in looking for a tell-all about 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,” Tendler said in an interview in July at a kitschy diner about an hour from her home in Connecticut.

Audiences first encountered a version of Tendler via her ex-husband’s tendency to plumb his personal life for material. After the two married in 2014, Tendler made frequent appearances in his stand-up sets: “My wife is in love with this Timothée Chalamet,” he groaned in one 2018 comedy special.

That picture was complicated by a swift torrent of tabloid headlines and social media posts. Mulaney entered rehab for alcohol and drug addiction at the end of 2020. In May 2021, the couple issued statements that they would divorce; four months later, Mulaney announced that he was having a baby with actress Olivia Munn.

Online, rubberneckers of the divorce were eager to claim Tendler as a kind of mascot for the betrayed. When the memoir was announced in March, fans of that ilk started salivating.

“Ruin him queen,” one wrote in response to Tendler’s announcement of her upcoming book in a post on Instagram.

Tendler spoke warmly but deliberately, at times pausing to sip a chocolate milkshake.

“I think a lot of this has to do with the age of social media, but people feel like they know someone from fairly small amounts of information,” she said. “That phenomenon kind of scares me.”

She said she was initially frustrated by the assumption that her memoir would focus on her divorce from Mulaney, but added that she had learned from experience that she had no control over what people would speculate about.

She wanted to write about something more universal than her celebrity relationship, she said: the ways in which men underestimate and sideline women.

Tendler did not set out to write a memoir. In the fall of 2022, she pitched a coffee-table book of her photographs with essays. Sean Manning, a vice president and executive editor at Simon & Schuster, was intrigued and tried to persuade her to recast it as a memoir, Tendler recalled.

Manning had edited actress Jennette McCurdy’s memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” a bestseller that was appreciated for its candor and narrative audacity rather than McCurdy’s relationship to the spotlight. He admired Tendler’s sharp writing and thought her story had similar potential.

“Her identity has been very much limited and diminished by a perception of who she is,” Manning said in an interview. In the book, “she’s able to speak for herself, and she’s able to tell the story that she wants to tell.”

Tendler grew up in Connecticut, a serious dancer whose parents separated when she was 16. Her family did not fit into the state’s ultrarich stereotype, she told Harper’s Bazaar: “People hear Connecticut, and they think Greenwich.” After an injury when she was 14 derailed her dance career, she cycled through unsuccessful stints in school and as a makeup artist and a hairstylist, often financially dependent on her romantic partners.

“My life feels like a series of starts and stops, walking road after road, hoping to find the one that leads to something meaningful,” she writes in the book. “Yet when I come to an intersection, instead of walking straight, I unfailingly turn left, beginning all over in a new direction.”

Losing dance as an outlet, she began cutting herself at 14, she writes. After improvement in her 20s and early 30s, her mental health challenges deepened in 2020 as her marriage disintegrated in the thick of the pandemic.

She checked into a psychiatric hospital in Connecticut on New Year’s Day in 2021 at the recommendation of her therapist. She had gashes on her thighs from cutting herself with scissors, she writes in the book’s opening scene. When a nurse asked her to rate her desire to die on a scale out of 10, she put it at an 11.

She remained in the hospital for two weeks. The book revels in the minute details of her stay: the confoundingly small notebooks handed out to patients, the leopard-print sweatsuit she wore for several days, the surprisingly tasteful settee in one waiting room. She underwent hours of psychiatric assessments, some more elucidating than others, and tried creative arts therapy like making bracelets and potting Cuban-oregano plants.

During her stay and afterward, Tendler said she grew more aware of her tendencies to chase uninterested men and to suppress her own desires to please them. From that realization came a wave of anger.

“I feel like I had reached this apex of anger toward patriarchy and the ways in which men have overpowered my life,” she said. “The book was this really amazing exercise in ‘I’m angry. How do I get that across in a way that’s constructive?’”

She wrote the manuscript over the course of two years, referring often to the detailed notes she had taken while in the hospital.

Chapters examine Tendler’s lopsided power dynamics with the 29-year-old to whom she lost her virginity when she was 17 and the multimillionaire boyfriend who offered to pay her to clean the vacation rental he was sharing with his friends in the Hamptons. (Most names in the book were changed to protect subjects’ privacy.)

Her biggest source of anxiety about the book’s release is the reactions of the people who are in it. Of the several men she mentions in the book, she offered to send three of them their chapters. None took her up on it. She declined to say whether she had shared any of the book with Mulaney, and declined to comment any further on their relationship.

Her current boyfriend has read a copy and is supportive, she said. “We’ve been together for, like, seven months, which I’ve for my own sake wanted to keep private,” she said.

After emerging from the hospital, Tendler completed her master’s degree in costume studies from New York University and participated in an outpatient dialectical behavioral therapy group. Her mental health has improved substantially since its nadir, she said.

“I don’t even recognize that person anymore. At the same time, I still have anxiety. I still have days where I feel sad about things or I feel really overwhelmed.”

Despite the mix of excitement and nerves Tendler feels about the book’s release, she does not seem to have any regrets about its direction. To focus the memoir on her divorce from Mulaney would have been “a crutch that I didn’t need.”

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If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.