Anna Marie Tendler is looking to the future following her split from John Mulaney last year.
Mulaney and Tendler stunned fans in May 2021 when they confirmed they were divorcing after six years of marriage. By September, Mulaney announced that he and his new girlfriend, Olivia Munn, were expecting a baby. Their son, Malcolm Hiệp, was born Nov. 24.
In a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Tendler doesn’t mention her ex-husband by name but nonetheless alluded to the emotional upheaval she’s experienced over the past year.
“Everything that has transpired has been totally shocking and I think surreal,” the author and multimedia artist told the magazine. “In a way, I feel like, well, it can only go up from here, because I reached the depth of where I could go.”
Later, Tendler said the isolation she felt after the split was exacerbated by the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic, and she found solace only by focusing on her work.
“I had a lot of bad days and medium days,” she explained. “I wouldn’t say I had any good days until the summer. 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.”
“Just have your whole life fall apart,” she added, “and then develop a hand skill!”
The magazine also points out the “betrayal” many of Mulaney’s fans expressed after he became a father, as the comedian had repeatedly stated that he and Tendler had no plans to have children.
Noting that she’s “always held partnership above having kids,” Tendler is now reconsidering the prospect of motherhood and plans on freezing her eggs.
“There were things I never even thought about before because that was just a closed door,” she said. “So now that it feels like not as much of a closed door, it’s something that I ruminate on a lot.”
“I feel lucky that I get to be standing on the precipice of all of these new things, that I get to possibly experience, and who knows how they will go? And there is certainly something exciting about that,” she concluded.
Read the full Harper’s Bazaar interview with Anna Marie Tendler here.
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