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

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On the Shelf The Sane One: A Memoir by the Co-Creator of Pen15By Anna Konkle Random House: 368 pages, $30If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.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 en...