The writer and actor spent years grappling with childhood shame, parental estrangement, and self-doubt. Now, she's made it to the other side and is sharing what she learned in The Sane One

Anna Konkle knows what a 13-year-old sounds like. 

Konkle is the co-creator of the 2019 Hulu series Pen15, in which she and BFF Maya Erskine played versions of themselves as teens in the early 2000s. Konkle and Erskine’s co-stars? Actual teenagers. 

The show developed a cult following capturing the comical and sometimes painful realities of teenagedom that are often shrouded in shame — discovering masturbation, asking out a class crush. Notably, the series honed in on family strife, and just as Konkle’s parents had in real life, her TV parents split up and quite literally divided the house in two. 

Konkle’s memoir, The Sane One (out today), tackles these same themes. It’s a coming-of-age story charting personal growth and family dynamics — only this time, it’s not as seen on TV. There isn’t always a punchline.

Much of Konkle’s book focuses on a five-year period of estrangement from her father as an adult, and the circumstances that led to it. She recounts decades of poor boundaries, both physically and emotionally, such as learning later on in life that he’d started greeting her friends by attempting to kiss them on the mouth. Her feelings of discomfort grew when she learned her half-brother had decided to end contact with him. At the height of Konkle’s distrust toward her father, she began to believe that he might have sexually abused her as a young girl and that she’d repressed memories of it. 

Their estrangement lifted after the two exchanged letters, and she felt reassured that no sexual abuse had ever transpired. Not too long after, Konkle’s father learned of his terminal cancer diagnosis. Konkle cared for him until the end. 

The Sane One also chronicles Konkle’s relationship with her mother, whose unpredictable nature could lead to screaming matches. Reliving these episodes, Konkle gathers in retrospect that for much of her childhood, she was the one acting as a parent, and her parents as her children. “Certainly it was ingrained in me from an early age that life is better when you are deeply aware of your parents’ feelings and needs,” Konkle tells Rolling Stone. “It’s better if you can meet them.”

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Since Pen15, Konkle has appeared in the Apple TV comedy series Murderbot and The Afterparty. But she says writing this memoir over the last few years — and learning how to break and heal some of those unhelpful habits — felt both inevitable and necessary. “It wasn’t a choice,” Konkle says. “The book just felt like one of those things that you can’t say no to doing.”

Konkle spoke to Rolling Stone ahead of The Sane One’s release. 

How are you feeling with this deeply personal book about to come out?
The main feeling is immense wonder and joy that I got to do this. It’s also scary. It feels like I wrote this collection of secrets in story form. I [was] trying to have the mantra “just write like no one’s going to read it.” Now people are going to read it, and I want them to, but I feel so exposed, which is the point.

You initiated the estrangement from your dad after it occurred to you that he might have sexually abused you. Even after you later accept that he hadn’t, you harbored a lot of shame for even wondering about it. Did the act of writing lift some of that shame?
I was surprised to feel the shame. I think it’s still there, but the process did end up being healing. The more that I say it out loud, the more I read it, the more I talk about it, the less jarring it feels somatically. When I narrated the audio book, I didn’t feel triggered by it; it felt like owning a history. But I’m about to do a book tour, and starting to talk about it feels scary in a different way. These are not, you know, the most common story points — not every movie that devastates you is about wondering if [the character] was sexually abused. You’re never like, “I loved the part when she wondered!” 

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This was a pivotal part of your adult life, though. You were in your twenties as this was happening.
That time in my life devastated me, and it will always be a part of me. I didn’t feel like I had the voice that I wanted to have with my dad. At the same time there was a sort of braiding together [of those feelings with others about my male relationships], because I was also deeply disappointed by other men.

How aware were you of that braiding at the time?
I wasn’t aware of it then. I really boxed some things away. I later realized that my dad is also a piece of the patriarchy, even being a hippie liberal man.

One of the experiences you excavate is a sexual violation you endured at a party during the time you were in college. You write about the confusion that can occur with that kind of trauma, and wondering, even many years later, if it qualified as rape.
I was just trying just to be a girl in the world at a Boston party, and afterwards I was wondering, “Was that rape?” I decided it wasn’t, at the time. But the truth is, when I went back into that chapter while editing the book, I went on Reddit and looked for a rape definition. There wasn’t one that was clear enough for me. What is the line here? To say that it wasn’t or to say that it was felt irresponsible. It’s clearly something that I don’t have a word for, except it wasn’t not rape. I’m 39, I could feel really different in 10 years.

How do you feel about the link between some of the complicated relationships and challenging experiences you’ve had and the work you’ve made?
I am coming to terms with the fact that the work that I gravitate toward making is intentionally fucking with what the expectations of me are — as a girl, as a woman, as a daughter. A lot of what I’m writing about brings me a lot of shame and there is doubt, but it has proven to make me more comfortable in my skin. Selfishly, it absolutely helps for other people to be like, “Oh, my God, me too.” I got that gift in Pen15. It’s the inverse of how I grew up. You keep these things inside the home between the walls, and you just learn these things are not to be spoken about. 

While you were working on Pen15 your dad was sick, and you asked if you could change the shoot timeline. Hulu said no. Then later on in your dad’s illness, you write about being on set and Maya telling you to leave. You decided that people would have to figure it out. Was it challenging for you to risk pissing off the executives?
The zoom-out part of this is that I heard from many showrunners and especially showrunner-creator-actors that there’s immense burnout — you tend to not see your family, you don’t sleep, there’s no self-care, the only thing that’s important is the product. Fortunately for Maya and me, the product meant a lot spiritually and brought a lot of joy, but it also was still a product that was making money. I wish I’d had the strength and pride [from the beginning] to just say, “I know this isn’t convenient for people. I know that some of the art will be compromised. This will be complicated for everybody that’s already exhausted.”

Did you share pages of the book with your mom?
At the end. She is who she is in the book. I sent it to her at the end of 2025, before it was cemented, and I wanted to know where her memory differed from mine and if there was anything that she didn’t agree with. It freaked me out. She was asked to read in detail these moments that were traumatic, where she literally would black out [when I was younger]. She’s 80, you know. It’s a big ask.  

She wrote me these long texts while she was reading. A lot of it was apologizing, which makes me sad to say out loud. But my imperfect parents genuinely ended up with a redemptive storyline, because they were both really interested in accountability. 

Even talking about her now, it’s so clear you want to protect her.
It’s fascinating how much of that is taught. 

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You and your dad exchanged letters when you were ready to be back in touch. How did you think about the decision to include those letters in the book?
I don’t know that this story would be on paper right now if I didn’t write the letter and get the response from him. Those letters gave breath and validity to all the funny, beautiful moments that I had with him growing up. It all could exist together, and it has been very freeing. He’s all those things, my mom’s all those things, I’m all those things

There’s a cultural trend of adult children going no-contact with their parents. I wonder if you’ve offered a road map of sorts for coming back together.
When I hear about the no-contact people, I am so grateful for the time I was estranged from my dad, as guilty as I sometimes feel, because I learned a lot about myself and what I needed and also how I wanted to show up. Even though there’s a lot of unsavoriness to it, it is a story of hope for me.