Why the star of ‘PEN15’ had to stop talking to her father to finally hear herself

The morning after the 2019 Emmy Awards, Anna Konkle was driving to work when she got a concerning call from her father. He was calling to tell her that his prostate cancer had returned. Worse yet, the cancer had apparently traveled to his lungs.

Despite being in the middle of writing the second season of “PEN15,” the Emmy-nominated cringe-comedy in which Konkle and co-creator Maya Erskine portrayed themselves as brace-faced middle schoolers in the year 2000, Konkle began flying back and forth from Los Angeles to Florida to help oversee her father’s care. When he died in hospice, Konkle was there. “Those final two months of his life were the most devastating of my life,” says Konkle, 38, about the experience, which she writes about with care and clarity in her poignant new memoir, “The Sane One.” “But they’re also some of the months that I value the most, because we got to mend and reconnect.”

Sitting across from me at Cookbook Market & Cafe in Larchmont Village, Konkle admits this is the first time she has spoken at length about “The Sane One,” the audiobook for which she is due to record after our meeting. “It just felt like, How can I not talk about this? Especially in the death part, there was so much that was actually beautiful or funny or f—ed up, and we all will face it at some point. And if we’re lucky, we’ll see other people do it before us.”

Fans of Konkle’s might currently think of the actor, writer and director as “the funny one.” After all, she recently made a hilarious recent guest appearance on Season 5 of “Hacks”. It’s worth noting she first gained recognition in Hollywood near the tail end of the 2010s, a decade defined by confessional, antiheroic millennial dramedy in the comically self-aware vein of “Girls,” “Insecure” and “Broad City.” In Konkle’s “PEN15” she worked alongside her co-star and co-creator to put a uniquely meta spin on 30-somethings refusing to grow up by depicting true-to-life versions of their adolescent selves trudging through seventh grade as they acted opposite real teenagers.

Konkle never tried to hide the autobiographical components of her character’s home life, one where she felt like it was her responsibility to “fix” her parents’ (played by Melora Walters and Taylor Nichols) turbulent marriage. “Taylor, who played my dad, was the more wholesome, normalized version of who my dad was,” Konkle says. “There was so much [more] that we wanted to put in, but every time we started walking that path, it was like, that doesn’t fit. That’s not this story.”

Shortly after her father’s death, Konkle realized that the rest of the story belonged in a memoir. “In some ways, ‘PEN15’ was a reaction to loving memoirs,” she says. “Raw memory has always been very exciting to me. Reading other people’s memoirs and watching certain documentaries — not only are they owning these experiences, but they’re f—ing funny and devastating. They’re fine because they wrote it. They’re still alive, and they have a perspective on it, and it was just like lightning. I’m just wanting to write about the parts of myself that felt like we aren’t ready to talk about.”

(Random House)

It’s clear from page one of “The Sane One” that James “Peter” Konkle, a human resources manager for 7-Eleven, was a charismatic figure — someone she idolized completely while growing up in Vermont and Massachusetts. But with that charm and grandiosity came a lack of boundaries and a very real tendency to put Konkle in the middle of arguments with her mother, Janet Ryan, an elder care nurse. When the pair fought, it wouldn’t be unusual for Konkle’s father to glance knowingly at his daughter, as if to say, Can you believe mom’s being like this?

Anna Konkle.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

As a child, Konkle remembers feeling proud of the way her father treated her like a peer. “I think I built a lot of my identity as a kid on, like, my funny, cool dad that talks to me about philosophy and his bosses and politics and doesn’t see me as, like, just a girl that he’s raising,” Konkle says. “That I’m his friend, and he respects me. I’m 9, and I’ll give him advice about work. He’s not gonna take it. But that was such a point of pride.”

As a title, “The Sane One” is intended to be tongue-in-cheek. “I think as a kid, that’s how I saw myself,” Konkle says. “I started to realize that my parents were different when I went to other people’s houses. If I had a friend over, they’d hear my parents fight, and that wasn’t what I was experiencing in other houses. I felt like a f—ing sane one.

“The aspiration of being the sane one in the family is inherently funny and has always been my engine — not to supersede them, not to be better, but to be different. When I was little, it was studying how not to have [my parents’] marriage. As I got older, I realized I brought it with me, and it is a part of me, and how much therapy do I have to do to outrun this?”

It wasn’t only her father who blurred parent-child boundaries; he and Konkle’s mother both struggled in that arena. Konkle describes her mother’s tantrums as emotional thunderstorms that left her feeling resentful that she, the child, was having to comfort a parent, the ostensible authority figure. Konkle also recalls feeling “semi-disliked” by her mother, a pattern they later identified as being tied into generational trauma. “My mom and I were recently talking, and she said that she felt disliked by her mom,” Konkle says. “It’s like, I knew she loved me, but I didn’t feel like she liked me. And you can inadvertently pass that s— on. I think most of us do.”

After high school, Konkle moved to New York City to study musical theater at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She was filled with a newfound determination to create an intentional distance between herself and her parents, who finally got divorced when Konkle reached middle school but remained in the same house for two more years, with each refusing to move out until a judge finally stepped in and awarded the property to Konkle’s mother.

Anna Konkle.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

In New York, Konkle threw herself into her studies, worked as a waitress and took odd jobs with tenuous connections to acting — like pranking guests at a Halloween party thrown by pop singer Willa Ford. When her family life came up in conversations with friends, Konkle would dismiss her upbringing with humor. But as she grew closer to her then-boyfriend, she realized how hard it was for her to display true vulnerability. There was more that I needed to deal with,” she says. “The imperfections in my family had not been something I could just move away from. It wasn’t just something to joke or cry about and get over. It was something that was real, because it was within me, and there was no choice but to look at it.”

After studying at an intensive, experimental theater program in Amsterdam, where she met “PEN15” partner Erskine, Konkle graduated from NYU and kept pursuing acting. One night, when she was 23, her father came to see her at the opening night of a downtown play. At the afterparty, Konkle noticed her father behaving strangely. Why had he taken to kissing her and her friends on the lips as a form of greeting? “Maybe he doesn’t remember that I’ve asked him to stop,” she writes in “The Sane One.”

That same night, he told her an odd story about how the 2-year-old grandchild of the woman he was dating walked over and sat in his lap before being “rip[ped]” out, “like I’ve done something bad,” he said in the book. The lap-sitting toddler story reminded Konkle of certain things she didn’t like, physical boundaries her father had crossed — the mouth-kissing, the time she was changing in her room and he wouldn’t leave, saying, You know I changed your diapers. Most worryingly, when Konkle tried to confront him about these things during a visit to his new condo in Florida, he shouted, “I AM NOT A PEDOPHILE” over and over.

After the blowup, Konkle went no-contact. The fight had plunged her into an ocean of confusion about who her father was and what their relationship had become. “In the beginning of the estrangement, I was so obstinate, and I was seeing myself as the victim,” she says. “I was younger, paranoid about the past, and going through what I didn’t know at the time was PTSD about having a childhood where there was a lot of turmoil all the time … my dad was not in a good place, and I didn’t have the emotional tools to grapple with everything that was happening. I didn’t show up as my best self.”

Around this time in the early 2010s, Konkle left New York and joined her college friend (and soon-to-be creative partner) Erskine in L.A. The pair starred in a reality show-spoofing web series, which got them a development deal with the comedy agency Gersh. With their friend Sam Zvibleman, Konkle and Erskine wrote the pilot for PEN15 in 2014, and the show finally premiered on Hulu in 2019.

Over in her personal life, Konkle joined Al-Anon and sought individual therapy to work through what she felt about her father, whom she realized had not ever physically or sexually abused her. With the encouragement of her partner, TV writer and actor Alex Anfanger, she reached out to her father in a letter. He wrote back, and they reconciled in person when he came to see her in L.A.

In the “PEN15” writers room, Konkle says the very act of storyboarding her character’s life gave her a greater clarity about her own. “All of a sudden it was like ‘A Beautiful Mind,’” she says. “It felt like all of these emotional arcs and themes in my life and poetic moments that had just happened were clicking into place.”

It would take Konkle another four years to complete “The Sane One,” partially because she was juggling acting jobs (since “PEN15,” Konkle has appeared in multiple projects like Hulu dramedy “The Drop” and Apple TV series “The Afterparty” and “Murderbot”). “Part of the reason it was hard for me to finish was because I pitched it when I was six months pregnant,” Konkle says, referring to the now-5-year-old daughter she shares with Anfanger. “Then I had her, and I was like, ‘I don’t have to go back and write about all this s—. I need to move on. In some ways, what I had been through with my parents and simultaneously writing this book made me more hypervigilant with parenting. After [my daughter] was born, I had this feeling of trying to give her agency.”

Now that “The Sane One” is finally about to hit shelves, Konkle has certainly achieved a new level of catharsis. She still carries guilt around the estrangement, especially as her father is no longer living, but she also understands that she needed that time away in order to process her childhood as a whole. “When you grow up enmeshed, it’s like I had to go that extreme of the estrangement to hear myself,” says Konkle. “[I needed] to hear my voice outside of our relationship and his needs and his expectation of me. There was a lot of work for me to do, and I could blame how I grew up, or I could just do the work.”

Brodsky is an L.A. culture and music writer. Her forthcoming biography of Stevie Nicks, “Lessons & Lace,” published by Penguin Random House, debuts in September.

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