Parasocial Ex Anna Marie Tendler Is Doing Fine

God bless Harper’s Bazaar and Emily Gould for finally answering the question we have all been asking: Is Anna Marie Tendler okay? The people have been in the streets, demanding answers and refusing to stay silent until we learn the truth. The truth, it turns out, is that Tendler is, like, fine.

In a new profile for the magazine, Gould traveled to Tendler’s home in Connecticut to discuss the last year of the multimedia artist’s life. If you don’t know why that might be of interest to people, stop reading now. You don’t have to know, and I’m sure there is something else you could be doing with your time (I recommend deep cleaning your bathroom or reading a book). For everyone else, here is a recap.

Tendler is the ex-wife of comedian John Mulaney. He very publicly ended their marriage in 2021, and then got Olivia Munn pregnant while the ink on the divorce papers was still wet. In the wake of their split, Tendler began photographing herself in her home as a way to process the grief. She also joined TikTok, where people at least a decade younger than her comment things like “Anna is in her Reputation era.”

Sounds like a pretty bad year. But as we learn from Gould’s profile, Tendler is doing pretty well now. Some of those photos ended up selling for “prices in the mid-six figures” at an art fair in Brooklyn. She finished her NYU graduate thesis early last year, which was titled “The Lip Filler Phenomenon: Modern Medicine, Kylie Jenner, and Post-Feminist Sexuality.” She also got custody of her and Mulaney’s Instagram-famous dog, Petunia, in the divorce. To paraphrase Jenner herself, it seems that 2021 was Tendler’s year of realizing things.

Although Tendler is a burgeoning art-world star and has lots of options ahead of her, Gould makes it clear that “[Tendler] doesn’t want to be famous… she has witnessed firsthand how horrible being famous is.” Presumably she said this while speaking to a journalist for a profile in a major magazine for which she was photographed in several designer dresses, but whatever.

“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,” Tendler said. I’m glad she’s excited, and I’m ecstatic that I will finally be able to go to sleep at night knowing that she has “survived 2021.”