Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir

by Anna Marie Tendler

Women with consumption during the nineteenth century were thought to be the epitome of beauty. They are described in books and depicted in paintings as being luminescent with their milk-white skin and red lips. This is how men saw them, anyway. The perfect woman—impossibly pale, impossibly thin, lips tinted red (from coughing up blood), too tired to speak, too weak to move. All she can do is sit and stare out the window, incandescent as life leaves her body. A woman was thought by many to have contracted consumption due to some moral failing, so while her beauty was fetishized, her character was denigrated.

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

She can be both a good mother in some ways and a mother who created a volatile environment in other ways.”