“When something’s awkward, I inherently find it funny,” Anna Konkle, best known for cocreating the Emmy-nominated Hulu comedy series Pen15, tells Vanity Fair. “So even in the most painful moments, there tends to be someone above me going, ‘I know that’s hurting you right now, but that’s also really fucking funny.’” That inner voice inspired her to write her debut memoir, The Sane One, a deeply personal look at Konkle’s complex dynamics with her mother Janet and father Peter, whom she refers to now as “eccentric, funny outsiders.”
The book is not about Konkle’s comedy career, but rather the familial dysfunction that may have helped cultivate it. Like other stories of fractured childhoods, including Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died and Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle, Konkle writes in unflinching detail about how her relationship with her parents devolved under the weight of a messy divorce and financial strain. “There’s been so much validation that I wasn’t actually the freak that I thought I was,” Konkle says of shedding any shame that comes with sharing her story. “We’re all probably a lot more freaky than we even know—at that age, and always. That’s the working thesis of my art, is to push the edge of exposing freakiness until people are like, ‘Okay, you’re alone on that. You’re on an island.’”
‘The Sane One’ by Anna Konkle
Konkle’s complicated bond with her father, whom she once believed to be her “childhood best friend,” is a focal point. During a particularly tense visit to his Florida home in her early 20s, Konkle confronts her dad about being inappropriate with her and other female friends. He denies any wrongdoing, but the fight incites a five-year estrangement between Konkle and Peter. Before his 2019 death, Konkle’s father battled prostate cancer, which spread to his lungs shortly after their reconciliation.
Konkle learned her father would be checked into hospice while on the set of PEN15, the semi-autobiographical Hulu series she cocreated and starred in with her close friend Maya Erskine, in which they both played middle-school versions of themselves surrounded by a cast of actual children. Now, with the two-season show wrapped in 2021, Konkle has unearthed another chapter of her complicated coming of age. In conversation with VF, the author shares where she stands with her mother, why she and Erskine are better friends than business partners, and how she accidentally got Meghan Markle back to acting.
Vanity Fair: How long after closing the PEN15 chapter did you consider exploring your adolescence through a book?
Anna Konkle: In the last weeks of my dad’s life—granted he was on morphine—he was like, “Write our story. The whole story.” And it hit me like, “Oh, he’s aware, even on morphine, of how impactful our journey has been on me.” There was a layeredness to my relationship with my dad that would have been simplified in film or TV form. I felt like the literary world got off the bat, but I don’t think that would have happened if I was trying to pitch it [as a show or movie.]
Did mining your childhood with PEN15 prepare you for writing the book?
PEN was helpful in that I had cocreators Sam Zvibleman and Maya Erskine going, “This show works when we are very accurately, unapologetically holding up a mirror to what the moment really was.” And it’s the most exciting to hold up a mirror to the moments you haven’t seen that often: masturbation, crying after my first kiss. That’s not in the Hilary Duff version of middle school, you know?
Maya and Anna on PEN15 (played by show cocreators Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle).BY ALEX LOMBARDI/HULU.
This is the gift that I got from PEN15 because there were so many moments of me being like, “Oh my God, you too?” I did an interview the other day and afterwards an intern was like, “My dad tried to kiss my friends on the lips too.” And I was like, “Weird, what’s up with dads?”… I have realized that my work is where I get to be like an anarchist. Maybe when I’m 99 I’ll have arrived at, “Fuck all of you. Who cares?” I’m not there yet, but my art is ahead of me in that, I think.
How has your bond with Maya Erskine, whom you write about meeting in a comedy program with John Early and Rachel Bloom, changed since your daily working relationship ended?
Maya’s still one of my absolute best friends. We deeply connected, as you read in the book, during the early days of estrangement with my father. That was a time of complete unraveling for me where I wasn’t comfortable showing my undoneness that had been saved for the loud nights behind closed doors at my house. I was always told growing up, without words, you put on a happy face, do well in school, look well-adjusted. That’s the job.
That time—[Konkle pauses, her voice breaking] I don’t want to get emotional—of meeting Maya and moving to LA and having what felt like her just cradle me was… She appreciated going against the grain. She was like a teacher and a caretaker, as were a lot of other friends, like Jessy Hodges, who’s married to Beck Bennett. I lived in their house for a while. This community that surrounded me—it was the opposite of what I thought LA was supposed to be, which was fake and Rodeo Drive.
Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle during a 2021 interview with host Seth Meyers.NBC/Getty Images
The work with Maya was coming from a need to laugh and survive that hard time. It was a very, very, creatively fulfilling, amazing time, but it was so hard and brutal. The act of being business partners…It ends up being before a best friendship because we’re working 16-hour days for years, and it’s all about work. So [now] we basically got to totally give back to the friendship. It feels like coming home in some ways. She’s part of my community first, not my business partner, if that makes sense?
Did appearing on Hacks’ final season make you miss working in episodic comedy?
There’s a total love for Paul [W. Downs] specifically—being in [your show] and showrunning, going from being in front of the camera, and then running back to the monitors to see how that scene played out. That was very much me and Maya’s experience. Lucia [Aniello] and Jen [Statsky] are incredible. I’m constantly reminded how tired I was when I see other showrunners. It was further confirmation that I want to show-run again, but in-front and behind [the camera]: no, thank you. I’m trying to focus behind the camera, at least for a couple years. Then maybe I’ll go back to insisting on playing freaks, if I’m going to play anyone.
Anna Konkle as final season love interest to Hacks co-creator and star Paul W. Downs.Courtesy of Warner Bros.
You are in the film Close Personal Friends, which marks Meghan Markle’s return to the screen. Did you have any interactions with her on set?
No, I filmed in London and LA with Lily Collins, Brie Larson, and Jack Quaid. My character is childhood best friends with Lily’s character, who’s getting close with Brie, who’s playing a huge movie star. My character follows the tabloids on her new best friend. We got to improv. I think they went on a yacht in the story and I’m grilling them like, “Was Meghan Markle there? Are we talking Harry?” And in the improv, they were like, “Yeah, she was there.” I totally forgot about it. Then the director Jason Orley was like, “Oh, I wanted to tell you, we asked Meghan to be in [the movie] off of that.” I heard she was nice on set!
In The Sane One, you write that, at some of your darkest moments, you contemplated self-harm and questioned the physical nature of your relationship with your father. What was important to you in sharing those vulnerable thoughts?
Subjects that I feel the greatest shame or discomfort around sharing are, for whatever reason, what I’m compelled to write about. I was first pitching that in the PEN15 writers’ room in the “Vendy Wiccany” episode in season two that I wrote. Everyone’s supportive, but it was maybe an odd place to put it. It felt like a big admission, but I don’t know how it hit.
The feeling of wanting to disappear in its simplest form, or passive suicidal ideation, according to my therapist, started when I was really young. It started with recognizing how much pain I was in at an early age. Then it gave me permission to start detailing my childhood day-to-day. And once I started to do that, it made more sense how I ended up where I did with my dad in my mid-20s. The level of pain was the gateway to detailing the memories. Why am I literally ending up in a fetal position on the floor wanting to disappear, fantasizing about self-harm, after I fell out with my mom?
Putting the puzzle pieces together of how things atrophied with my dad, I realized it was in conjunction with my sexual relationship with men in general. I’m having my sexual awakening/realizing there were a ton of ways I did not feel comfortable sexually, but thought I would. There’s discomfort with being around my father physically, and realizing there was synergy to those two things.
Then I’m in the car with my dad and his hand on my thigh feels different than before. There’s physical boundaries with my dad that I started to realize I needed and didn’t feel comfortable asking for. Or when I didn’t feel as respected as I wanted to be in conjunction with feeling like my body wasn’t respected as I was experimenting with sexuality for the first time with guys. It was not where I intended to go when I pitched the book. Some stories knock at me, like, “Tell this story.” It felt integral to tell the full story of this murky time in my life, and so it had to be in.
Anna Konkle at the premiere of the Apple TV series Murderbot, on which she starred in 2025.Kristina Bumphrey/Getty Images
What has it been like to share the book with your mother?
My mom has been nervous since I pitched it four years ago. But she has been incredibly supportive. I’ve had many deep conversations along the way of, “I just want you to know this is the scene or chapter that I’m writing.” There’s a deep breath on the other side of the phone, sometimes an apology, and gathering herself back up, going, “It’s your art and I’m proud of you and I’m sorry.” What more could I ask for? It’s probably why we’re quite close now. I do feel bad that I’m dredging up difficult memories when she’s worked really hard to move forward and grow. But the fact that she’s not fighting against me writing all this and releasing it, tells me that there’s real accountability. And there’s been a lot for me to take accountability about as well.
You write: “No matter how many times you try to kill it, self-doubt will always find a safe home inside the making of art.” How did you keep self-doubt at bay while writing the book?
Some people are probably really not going to like this. I obviously hope there’s more people that really like it. But if a couple people who felt the level of leperness that I felt after Florida with my dad, or are going through that dark period like when I first moved to LA, or are even younger, their parents fighting and they feel alone, if [the book] does for somebody else what so many artists have done for me, telling their story and being honest about low points in their life, then it’s totally worth it. You just have to write assuming that’s going to happen.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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