A new memoir from Anna Konkle, who has made a career out of putting a comedic spin on her Massachusetts middle–school experience, shares the dysfunction behind the laughs.
By Kelly Chase
I went to middle school with Anna Konkle, the co-creator and co-star of the critically acclaimed Hulu show, PEN15. While most, including me, are happy to blast past the middle school-aged years and even will away the memories with self-induced amnesia, Konkle has spent her career turning the hallways we walked into art.
If you haven’t seen the primetime Emmy-nominated show, PEN15, it is a tragicomedy about two 13-year-old best friends who, through a series of hilarious and cringeworthy scenes, struggle to fit in. It’s awkward, heartfelt, and wickedly funny all at once. Konkle and her co-creator, Maya Erskine, not only wrote the show, but they also star in it as 13-year-old versions of themselves (albeit in their 30-year-old bodies).
“To me, a lot of the best comedies have a childlike main character: I Love Lucy, The Comeback, any Jim Carrey movie; they are these adults who are sort of half kid. And the kid part of me is so earnest and embarrassing but also funny and a little sad,” says Konkle. “When brutality and humor kind of braid together, that’s always been my favorite thing to read, to watch.”
This spring, Konkle will release an even more intimate portrait of her life with her memoir, The Sane One. Through vignettes from childhood into adulthood, she examines what it was like to grow up in a fractured family with parents who don’t always seem like parents. Reading her memoir, which partially unfolds in our shared hometown, I recognize the people’s names, the hallways she describes, and the atmosphere of that place and time. What surprised me the most was how much I didn’t know. Konkle tells me in her work she likes to dig into the messiness of being human at all stages of life, including those preteen years.
“Whether you look like everything is fine or not, the point is that no matter how someone appears, everybody is a freak in middle school,” she says. “Nobody feels like they fit in and everyone is wearing some kind of costume that hides what is happening in their family, or how they feel about their body or brain, their sexuality or gender.”
Konkle calls me on a Friday afternoon and when I pick up, she tells me she almost tried my parents’ landline number first because it was saved in her phone. I am suddenly 13 again. We reminisce about Scituate: the little shop on the harbor that sold sand creatures and beads—now a coffee shop—and swap the wilder stories from middle and high school that somehow all turned out to be true. Thirty minutes later, I ask, “Should we start the interview?” “I guess we probably should,” she says.
This is the Anna Konkle I’ve always known: quick-witted, disarming, and kind to her core. She has made a career out of rehashing old middle school misadventures, such as disastrous school dances and awkward first kisses. I ask her why she thinks she keeps going back to this time in her life.
“I once asked Judy Blume a similar question, and it was reassuring that she basically said, ‘I don’t know.’ I guess I really don’t know either,” she says. “There’s this comedic but also sad, almost tragically stunted quality to being stuck in those middle-school years.”
While PEN15 mined a lot of middle school material—she said about half of what happens on the show happened in Massachusetts—her book covers far more, which she admits is “darker while still managing to find humor.” She goes deep into her dysfunctional familial relationships, her own insecurities, and her most painful memories, such as her parents’ bitter divorce, and her estrangement from her father and his health challenges.
“A lot of what I’m writing about in the more emotional parts, they were these little monster memories in the shadows of my brain that I didn’t want to interact with. The book is brutal, my mom is like, ‘I need to move out of the universe,’” she says, laughing. “But I genuinely go to a place where I feel kind of grateful for it all, and I was not expecting that.”
When Konkle was in elementary school, her dad took a job as a human resource manager for 7-Eleven. She and her parents moved from Vermont to Scituate, Massachusetts. It was exciting at the time, but the transition wasn’t without difficulty. “My parents were eccentric, and I think Vermont matched them a little better,” she says, adding that her mom was both a nurse and a reiki healer. And her dad was hyper-charismatic and unafraid to speak his mind.
At every friend’s house she visited she realized just how different and chaotic her family dynamic was. Her friends’ families ate dinner together and talked about their days, while Konkle’s parents careened between screaming matches and days-long silences.
Out in the wild that is the middle school hallway came horrible nicknames and imaginary relationships with crushes. Konkle says she tried to fit herself into an acceptable mold of a preteen but often found herself failing. “I was a bit of an eccentric too, and I was a people pleaser,” she says. “That ‘fitting-in’ dance I had to do is probably why PEN15 exists and why I like making the kind of art I do.”
Amidst the most difficult chapters in The Sane One are passages of levity that include her first house party gone wrong. The reader takes a ride through her successes, from her time at New York University, where she met her costar Erskine, to the network pitches that eventually land them their award-winning series. But throughout she is also reckoning with her complicated relationship with her parents, especially her father. “It’s an intense read,” she says. “My hope is that it’s redemptive. No one is a villain, everybody is imperfect, and everybody grows.”
Knowing how much of herself she put into PEN15, I ask her how she felt right before it aired. And then how she feels now with her memoir set to release. “With PEN15, I was terrified. Maya and I were in New York City for our first late-night show appearances, and back in our hotel room, I was curled up in the fetal position on the floor,” she says. “We had fought so hard to get this show made, and all of a sudden, everybody was going to see it. The show holds a lot of our own secrets, and it just felt so revealing.”
From that experience, she learned something that has steadied her as her memoir arrives in bookstores. “I learned that if you share your secret, someone is going to say, ‘Oh, I thought I was alone, and I’m not, so thank you,’ and that’s really nice,” she says.
Perhaps too often we think that mentally blocking the messiest moments of our lives is helpful, but if Konkle teaches us anything in The Sane One, it’s that while it can be hard to go back, maybe there’s a peace in it too. “Actually looking at the worst moments that I didn’t want to look at, writing them down and editing them a hundred times… it made me go, okay, we are all human. I’m human. These were scary moments, but none of them broke me. In fact, it gave me resilience and grit.”
The Sane One is available now in bookstores across the country.
