Anna Konkle of PEN15 Revisits Her Complicated Childhood In Debut Memoir, The Sane One
You are in the film Close Personal Friends, which marks Meghan Markle’s return to the screen. Did you have any interactions with her on set?No, I filmed in London and LA with Lily Collins, Brie Larson, and Jack Quaid. My character is childhood best friends with Lily’s character, who’s getting close with Brie, who’s playing a huge movie star. My character follows the tabloids on her new best friend. We got to improv. I think they went on a yacht in the story and I’m grilling them like, “Was Meghan Markle there? Are we talking Harry?” And in the improv, they were like, “Yeah, she was there.” I totally forgot about it. Then the director Jason Orley was like, “Oh, I wanted to tell you, we asked Meghan to be in [the movie] off of that.” I heard she was nice on set!In The Sane One, you write that, at some of your darkest moments, you contemplated self-harm and questioned the physical nature of your relationship with your father. What was important to you in sharing those vulnerable thoughts?Subjects that I feel the greatest shame or discomfort around sharing are, for whatever reason, what I’m compelled to write about. I was first pitching that in the PEN15 writers’ room in the “Vendy Wiccany” episode in season two that I wrote. Everyone’s supportive, but it was maybe an odd place to put it. It felt like a big admission, but I don’t know how it hit.The feeling of wanting to disappear in its simplest form, or passive suicidal ideation, according to my therapist, started when I was really young. It started with recognizing how much pain I was in at an early age. Then it gave me permission to start detailing my childhood day-to-day. And once I started to do that, it made more sense how I ended up where I did with my dad in my mid-20s. The level of pain was the gateway to detailing the memories. Why am I literally ending up in a fetal position on the floor wanting to disappear, fantasizing about self-harm, after I fell out with my mom?Putting the puzzle pieces together of how things atrophied with my dad, I realized it was in conjunction with my sexual relationship with men in general. I’m having my sexual awakening/realizing there were a ton of ways I did not feel comfortable sexually, but thought I would. There’s discomfort with being around my father physically, and realizing there was synergy to those two things.Then I’m in the car with my dad and his hand on my thigh feels different than before. There’s physical boundaries with my dad that I started to realize I needed and didn’t feel comfortable asking for. Or when I didn’t feel as respected as I wanted to be in conjunction with feeling like my body wasn't respected as I was experimenting with sexuality for the first time with guys. It was not where I intended to go when I pitched the book. Some stories knock at me, like, “Tell this story.” It felt integral to tell the full story of this murky time in my life, and so it had to be in.
