Anna Konkle says her memoir The Sane One drew on the same instincts as Pen15, but with more room for rawness and experimentation.
Anna Konkle’s new memoir, The Sane One, reaches further back than her breakthrough comedy, and she says the shift changes how “real” her work can feel.
Fans will recognize Konkle from Pen15, where she played a 13-year-old version of herself alongside co-creator Maya Erskine, with other roles filled by real pre-teens.. But in The Sane One, she’s moving into earlier territory, using the book to examine her relationship with her father, including both estrangement and reconciliation before his death.
Konkle also addressed the recurring question from Pen15 watchers: how closely the show mirrored her actual life.. She framed it as familiar truths with more still underneath, describing the Pen version of her parents as “the tip of the iceberg,” and emphasizing that the deeper layers mattered to her even if the show’s format couldn’t fully hold them.
In this context, the memoir becomes less about staging and more about making space for the emotional mechanics behind the comedy. Pen15 carried laughs and absurdity, but Konkle says the rawness and brutality in her story ultimately fit better in book form, where she could be more experimental.
That includes how the writing process expanded beyond her own memory. As she moved from pitching to drafting, she shared the manuscript with many relatives she still has relationships with, specifically to offer them a chance to weigh in and to make sure they felt comfortable being included.
Insight: This approach matters because it shows how memoir writing can be both personal and relational, especially when family histories are part of the material. It also helps explain why the tone can feel intimate without becoming careless.
Konkle said her mother, in particular, grappled with the challenge of reading a lot of information from a father who would not be present to offer approval.. Still, Konkle described a message from her father before he passed: to “write it all,” and she said her family’s support generally carried her through.
After years of working through the past on screen, Konkle described finishing the book as something that became especially intense after she became a mother.. She explained that pitching the memoir happened while pregnant, then completing it brought a wave of self-questioning about how long one should keep cycling back to earlier chapters of life.
Insight: The emotional stakes shift when life changes in parallel with the writing, because it can force creators to test whether old patterns still serve them.. In Konkle’s case, that pressure appears to have sharpened the book’s focus on everyday survival, shame, and the strange relief of saying things out loud.
She tied the memoir’s themes to her broader interests as a writer, describing a taste for the absurd, slow-burn details of ordinary life and the tension between sadness and humor.. Konkle said Pen15 gave her confidence to keep talking about what can feel isolating, aiming to write in a way that helps readers recognize themselves, even if that means embracing the feeling of being “weird” together.
The Sane One is now available wherever books are sold, while Pen15 continues to stream on Hulu.