The Sane One: A Memoir by the Co-creator of Pen15

by Anna Konkle

In this emotional and laugh-out-loud coming-of-age memoir, the co-creator of Hulu's brilliant Pen15 grapples with the reappearance of her estranged father —and whether it's possible to reconnect before it’s too late.

For Anna Konkle’s childhood, her father was her hero—a hyper-charismatic, larger-than-life human resource manager at 7-Eleven. But their closeness was constantly interrupted by the screaming matches and heavy silences between him and her mother, eventually culminating in a bitter divorce that literally split the family house down the middle, with one parent on each side.

College felt like freedom, and Anna filled her time searching for the husband she'd never divorce and the orgasm she'd never had, while waiting tables at fancy restaurants and getting lackluster acting gigs, the strangest of which had her working celebrity Halloween parties. But just as she begins to thrive, her father starts to struggle. Not long after she moves to LA to pursue acting and writing, her dad’s increasingly erratic behavior forces her to cut off contact with him, until, years later, he knocks at her door.

Written in intimately beautiful prose, The Sane One is a tragicomic memoir of growing up, falling apart, getting older, and trying to come back together while there’s still time.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

368 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication May 5, 2026

Reviews

[Taylor Penn · Rating 5 out of 5]

TLDR; laugh, laugh, laugh, cry, cry, cry.

If you’ve ever watched Pen15 and thought, “there’s simply no way this level of awkwardness isn’t pulled straight from real life,” The Sane One more or less confirms it. Anna Konkle writes like she’s sitting across from you, elbows on the table, a bottle of wine deep, sharing things that you actually couldn’t pull out of me with the jaws of life themselves.

The memoir unfolds, more or less, in 3 clean beats: Childhood (elementary, middle, and high school,) College (where shortly thereafter she meets Maya Erskine,) and adulthood—which carries us through her adult life, meeting her now-husband, co-creating Pen15, and caring for her father at the end of his life.

The momentum of Anna’s life is quiet, slowly shifting with most of the emotional wreckage coming in the final acts. But her voice is what hooked me; she writes in a way that is conversational, sloppy, and honest. Maybe not for everyone, but for me, as a fellow child of divorce and former painfully awkward kid it felt cathartic. I was transported back to 2021, sitting on my friend Mary’s parents’ kitchen floor, swapping middle/high school traumas while her mom’s bitch cat, Kitty, takes cheap shots at my feet. That same raw, unfiltered energy lives in the Sane One. Anna Konkle sees me and I see her right back.

Early reviews are still sparse, but the few on Goodreads seem to share similar hang-ups: the juvenile tone in the first third and Konkle’s bluntness/harshness re: who her father was prior to his illness. Neither of those things bothered me. Her voice evolves alongside her aging in the book, which feels intentional. As for her parents, it feels shitty to judge Anna for sharing her truth (I’m very much of the mind that if you don’t want people to know you did something shitty, then you shouldn’t do things that are shitty). At 300-something pages, there is simply no way for the reader to know the full scope of their dynamic. So, instead of judging, I find myself between the pages, spotting similarities between my relationship with my own parents. And in a weird, possibly para-social way, I’m proud of Anna for her vulnerability.

So, this is a 5/5 for me. Honest, vulnerable, and disarmingly funny in a way that is so hyper-specific as to make weirdos like me feel not so alone.

Thank you to Netgalley, Random House, and Anna Konkle for the arc.

[Lauren Brumley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this book was going to make me laugh but what I did not expect is that it was going to make me ugly cry.

The first half of the book is a little hard to get through, because a lot of filler words and stammering are left in the dialogue. I assume it is a stylistic choice, but it makes it really hard to read.

I’m really glad I powered through that, though, because the second half of the book was really good. It deals with some heavy and confusing subject matter, but Anna writes about living through her father’s death after years of a very complicated relationship so vulnerably that it was refreshing. And devastating.

I also love PEN15, so I enjoyed learning more about her friendship and working partnership with Maya Erskine as well.

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my honest review!

[Kate Struthers · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a fan of PEN15, I had a feeling I was going to love this memoir. The show is one of those rare comedies that perfectly balances humor with genuine emotional depth, capturing the intensity and awkwardness of adolescence without romanticizing it.

This memoir carries that same balance. It’s funny, but also deeply heartfelt in a way that many comedies miss when they lean too far into silliness. I expected to laugh, but I didn’t expect to cry. While I loved reading about her childhood, what stayed with me most was seeing her growth and self-reflection as she moved through adulthood and her relationship with her dad. Loved everything about this.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced review copy. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Kate]

The last few chapters were genuinely heart wrenching and had me crying in the club

[Ellen Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have always been a fan of Anna but this memoir helped me get to know her even more. She is even more relatable than ever now that I got a glimpse into her childhood, her relationship with her father, and her overall family dynamics. This book is a rollercoaster of ups and downs with her family life but there are so many funny moments mixed in that it really kept the momentum going as I read - nothing too heavy. This book was really well written and now I’m even more of a fan than ever before. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Sacha · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars

Yes, Anna Konkle is a wildly talented humorist. This book is not going to remind you of that much. Instead, it's going to inform you of some major challenges and sad experiences in her life. Yet, you'll come out of this feeling hopeful. I did.

Konkle covers many at times funny moments from her childhood, but she also faces hard truths. Her parents' relationship is challenging. She wishes her half brother lived with her instead of choosing to live with his father and not their mother. She struggles with embarrassing moments and a big move. She then goes off to NYU, develops her talents, and becomes less relatable (but still totally likeable) through fame.

A major throughline of this book is Konkle's relationship with her father. It changes dramatically over time, and she charts it from her beginning to his end. There are some very dark moments on this journey, and readers who appreciate TW/CW should take a close look here before diving in. Konkle has a lot of questions and is committed to finding answers. Readers share in her journey.

I was surprised by how moving and thought provoking I found this read. Some memoirs from known funny folks tend to drift into the semi-silly. This isn't one of them. I hope writing this and getting this story out brings all kinds of closure. And what a banger of an epilogue.

*Special thanks to NetGalley and Random House for this arc, which I received in exchange for an honest review. The opinions expressed here are my own.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was initially interested in this memoir because I am a big fan of the author’s hilarious, bold, and inimitably unique show, Pen15. I think a lot of people getting this book will be in the same position as me - thinking this will be a memoir along the lines of Sloane Crosley, offbeat and very funny. However, while Pen15 was funny awkward, the bulk of this memoir is more heavy awkward.

This can totally be a vibe for someone, but I just want to warn fans of the show. You should get this if you are looking for something more real and serious, as it spends a long time essentially unpacking childhood/young adulthood trauma. At around Chapter 5, but definitely by Chapter 6, the tone does start to resemble the awkward comedy of the show, which is great. But I think knowing that this is a memoir and thus seated in reality still emphasizes the undertone of trauma, so I do still feel a little conflicted laughing at what’s going on.

Fans of the show don’t despair, around chapter 15, Anna meets her show cocreator Maya, and reading about how that partnership blossomed is something I was really hoping for in this book, but it is barely mentioned.

Overall, this is a deconstruction of a woman’s life and primarily her relationship with her father, good and ugly, no detail spared. While the show isn’t the point, there are tidbits in here for fans. 4/5 stars, check this out if you’re a fan of memoirs and bonus for fans of the show.

*An uncorrected proof of this book was provided by the publisher at the reviewer’s request in exchange for a fair and uncompromising review.

[Brice Montgomery · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley & Random House for the ARC

Anna Konkle’s The Sane One is more montage than memoir, a loose assemblage of scenes that reach for themes but can’t even get a grasp on tone.

I regret to inform my fellow Pen15 fans that this book is exactly what we’d wished for, and it just doesn’t work at all.

The strength of the show is Konkle’s ability to depict the moment-to-moment anarchy of adolescence. In our pre-teen years, we’re all caught between an almost-but-not-quite grown-up vocabulary and the object permanence of a literal infant. Pen15 is so good at showing that awkward reality—children have logic without the contextual knowledge to actually use it. The Sane One tries to take the same approach, but the problem is that it means we have over 300 pages of Konkle prodding at exposed nerves in her past, hoping that one of them will make the book “about” something.

Sexual dysfunction? Parental abuse? Family deaths?

Each topic appears here, and the author gestures at them with a confident uncertainty. She rushes at them as if there will be a grand reveal—as if they will make sense of everything—only to uncomfortably retreat when they don’t have any narrative momentum. There are lots of memoirs about sex. Maybe this is one?, Konkle seems to say. As an example of how this plays out, late in the book, she becomes convinced that her father abused her, only to learn that she was wrong. Rather than using the disconnect as a site for reflection or interiority, like, what does this say about me? that thread just deflates with a sort of ho-hum embarrassment. Pen15 is excellent because we see characters trial-and-erroring their way to maturity, and the specificity of each moment feels authentic. We can tell that the writers and actors have the distance—the perspective—to depict life accurately. Unfortunately, it doesn’t read well for a memoirist to trial-and-error their way to the end of a book, clumsily filibustering through past trauma with a mix of flippancy and desperation. Konkle isn’t invoking past confusion as much as evoking new uncertainty, and it often feels like she is following the memoir form out of obligation and struggling to keep up.

It’s telling that the most coherent and exciting chapter is about the early days of her friendship and creative partnership with Maya Erskine, and that's also where Konkle seems most confident and interested in her story. Why did she not just write that memoir and save her other topics for more focused books in the distant future?

Finally, as much as it pains me to say it, Konkle’s voice just falls flat here for the same reason that it sings on television. On Pen15, it’s pretty common for her character to slip into rambling, paragraph-length mixed metaphors that are appealing in their sinewy incomprehensibility. They sound exactly like a child trying to sound like a "poetic" adult, and it doesn’t matter that they don’t make sense. The important thing is that they show us something meaningful about the character. In print, Konkle does much the same thing, but these digressions are presented earnestly and without explanation, often burying actual information that would make sense of the story she is telling. As a result, rather than Konkle's metaphors offering a helpful interpretation of how events felt, they frequently obscure both her emotions and the "literal facts." For example, she describes her mother as a clown, but the ensuing paragraph bloats into a hat on a hat on a hat until it's not even clear what the initial "clown" idea was showing. There were several times I would read a paragraph or a page 5-6 times before accepting that I would just have to move on, completely baffled for the remainder of the chapter.

Ultimately, Anna Konkle’s The Sane One is the kind of book that will make you question your own sanity. It feels unfinished, unedited, and unintentional, and that’s a huge disappointment from someone who is so talented in another medium. I really hope to see the author write more in the future, but I think this particular book is definitely worth a skip.

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a big fan of Pen15 and embrace puerile humor, especially when it’s delivered in female form. I found Anna Konkle’s character simultaneously endearing, funny, and heartbreaking. Naturally, I was intrigued to read her memoir. It took me awhile to get into the book, but about a third of the way I found my groove and read at a more steady pace.

Anna, for the most part, appeared to have a loving relationship with her father. Yet, along the way, she questioned the nature of their relationship. (Not going to lie, there were many parts of this period that were extremely uncomfortable to read.) This lead to fights, questions of abuse, and inevitably, estrangement. Anna describes the formative years with her mother as chaotic, yet, her mother is let off pretty easy. Although Anna’s father seems by all accounts nurturing, loving, and actively fostering her success, he’s the bad guy.

When I got to the last quarter of the book, it took a more somber turn. Friends, if you’ve gone through the crucible of watching your parent get sick and be there for their final stages of life you know it is one of the most painful things you ever experience. And no matter how much time passes, the grief feels so fresh when you read someone else’s journey through it. This is not a negative reflection of the author. She is a gifted storyteller, but if I knew that this was a major part of the story I would have thought twice before reading it.

I give the book four stars. I just wish that the author was kinder to the memory of her father. But, I suppose that is the nature of art, to accept beauty with equal measures of pain. Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Amanda W · Rating 3 out of 5]

I spent most of this book feeling like I was reading a giant trauma dump with brief glimmers of fun, like when she is hired to play a joke on someone at a party (a truly bizarre story). Most of the chapters contain skin-crawlingly cringe stories about her parents and her childhood that I did not find "laugh-out-loud," as the description suggested. The final section of the book, where Konkle becomes her father’s caretaker, is tough to read if you have been through anything similar with an elder parent. Despite thinking the book could use a bit more self-reflection (especially in the first 2/3rds), it is almost compulsively readable. Konkle has an easy, comfortable voice that draws you in, even though you might be cringing the entire time.

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for this ARC!

[Fernanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC.

Much like PEN15, this book starts out with lots of laughs that cut straight to your heart with the pains of childhood and young adulthood, only to leave you wrung out and devastated by the reality of what being a grown up is. This book has that, the confusing and wary alliances between camp friends fast forwarding through to the realities of the drawn out grief of pre-mourning a parent's death.

The naturalistic style in dialogue is the one thing that doesn't truly work here, lots of "ums" left in, but that's something sure to work better in audiobook format.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you #Netgalley for the advanced copy!

I am familiar with the authors comedic work and was looking forward to learning more about her. But wow! She has been through a lot, even though topics could get heavy, her humorous perspective kept the reader engaged. We learn about her life in three buckets, childhood, college and adulthood and a major focus on her parents, particularly her father's impact on her life.