Anna Marie Tendler Talks To Harper’s Bazaar About Her Divorce From John Mulaney
Anna Marie Tendler did an interview with Harper’s Bazaar and talked about her art career, transforming her Connecticut home into a “haunted dollhouse”, and her extremely public divorce from John Mulaney. When the topic turned to John, Anna took a looong, deep drag from her cigarette and said, “So the cheater and his biggest fan had a baby he’ll have to pay child support for when they inevitably break?” JK, Anna kept it civil and described the divorce as “shocking” and “surreal.”
36-year-old Anna invited Harper’s Bazaar into her “19th-century stone house in the Connecticut woodlands,” which she uses as the backdrop for her series of extremely melodramatic artsy photographs, some of which sold for prices in the “mid six figures” (!!!) at a recent Brooklyn art fair. Anna and John bought the house in June 2020, but he’s never lived there. The interviewer noticed an oil painting of Petunia, and pointed it out to Anna, who explained, via Harper’s Bazaar:
“This is just a painting of Petunia that someone who was a fan of John’s painted and then gave to him at a show.”
We pause in front of the unframed oil portrait. It’s a great likeness of the dog, who has 151,000 Instagram followers. Petunia is following close at our heels as we tour the house, wheezing adorably as French bulldogs do. “He doesn’t want it?” I ask.
“I don’t think so.”
Daaamn. Anna is explicitly asked about the divorce and she responded:
“Everything that has transpired has been totally shocking and I think surreal,” she says. “In a way, I feel like, well, it can only go up from here, because I reached the depth of where I could go.”
Anna said that her no-good-very-bad 2021 was very lonely:
“I had a lot of bad days and medium days. I wouldn’t say I had any good days until the summer.” She pushed herself to do something artistic every day, even if it was small. “I feel so lucky that so much of my work is this mundane, detail-oriented handwork. I’m working with a needle and thread, and it’s like, if I’m not on it, I’m going to prick myself with a needle and fuck something up.” She smiles slyly and shifts her quirky voice into a more declarative register. “Just have your whole life fall apart and then develop a hand skill!”
She also managed to finish her master’s degree in costumes studies from NYU, along with her thesis, “The Lip Filler Phenomenon: Modern Medicine, Kylie Jenner, and Post-Feminist Sexuality.” Anna is excited about all the attention her art is getting, and she doesn’t want to squander what she gained during her marriage to John; namely, the time and resources to hone her artistic skills. She acknowledges “a lot of people don’t get that.”
The interviewer writes about how John making a baby with Olivia Munn felt like a betrayal to some of his fans, who liked that he and Anna were child-free-by-choice. When Anna was asked about the no-kids thing, she responded by saying that she “always held partnership above having kids,” but now she’s gonna freeze her eggs:
“There were things I never even thought about before because that was just a closed door. So now that it feels like not as much of a closed door, it’s something that I ruminate on a lot.”
Here are pictures from Anna’s photoshoot with Harper’s Bazaar:
Oh no, Olivia Munn. Anna’s getting attention! Post more pics of baby Malcolm on Instagram! Quick, Potatoes! Distract! Distract!
Pic: Wenn.com