On the first page of her debut memoir, The Sane One, Anna Konkle is pacing her apartment. The doorbell keeps ringing. Though she knows who it is, she hesitates. “On the other side is a man who has my same hair, cheeks, and nose, and who I haven’t seen for five years,” she writes. What follows is an excavation of her estrangement from her father, its roots reaching back to when she was six years old.
Best known for co-creating the Hulu original series Pen15—pronounced “pen-fifteen,” though styled, with tween humor, to read as “penis”—Konkle has a knack for channeling her younger self. She created the show with her college classmate and real-life best friend, Maya Erskine, the two of them in their 30s when they began playing heightened versions of their pre-pubescent selves on-screen—Konkle in braces and Erskine in a bowl cut. Pen15 ping-ponged between the cringiest moments of adolescence and its most tender: a first period, a first kiss, a parental divorce, a creeping awareness that your family isn’t as well off as your peers’. By the time it ended in 2021, the show had become a cult favorite, celebrated for its emotional honesty and razor-sharp humor.
