Anna Konkle: “There’s a lot that feels uncomfortable to share. And yet I want to.”

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

Anna Konkle has spent most of her career doing something most people actively avoid: looking directly at the embarrassing, painful, and half-buried parts of herself and turning them into art. The Pen15 co-creator — who, with best friend Maya Erskine, spent years playing cringe-worthy middle school versions of themselves opposite actual tweens — has made a career out of mining her own discomfort for material. Her new memoir, The Sane One, goes even further, tracing her estrangement from her father, their eventual reconciliation, and the long, complicated archaeology of memory that comes with writing a book over four years. "There's a lot that feels uncomfortable to share," she says. "And yet I want to."

In a conversation with Harper's Bazaar, Konkle traced the through-line of her creative identity — from waitressing 40 hours a week after NYU while doing downtown performance art for $100 a month, to an Eat, Pray, Love-style pivot to India where she started writing again just to feel something. That trip, she says, is where she finally found her voice. It wasn't the prestigious New York intellectual artist she'd been trying to perform — it was the move to LA, watching people bang out bad scripts in coffee shops with total earnestness, that cracked something loose. "It took the pressure off," she says. "And the pressure was paralyzing me."

The Uniform, The Crystals, The Loewe Jeans

Here's where fashion enters, and it's very on-brand for a woman who turned self-awareness into a career: Konkle is currently living in a 30-pack of Hanes boys' medium white undershirts and one very deliberate splurge — Loewe jeans. "If I'm getting $5 tank tops, I'm going to get some really nice trousers," she explains, with the clear logic of someone who has genuinely thought this through. She loves consignment stores, refuses to pay full price, and treats garage sales as a legitimate shopping strategy. The jeans were on sale. Obviously. It's a sensible, slightly defiant approach to dressing — not minimalism as aesthetic, but minimalism as a fuck-you to the idea that you have to spend evenly across the board.

And then there are the crystals. Her mother, a Reiki practitioner and registered nurse, had them everywhere growing up — alongside incense and healing magnets. Konkle was mortified. Now? "I have fucking crystals everywhere." She calls it a love-hate relationship, but they stay. It's the kind of detail that belongs in a memoir: the thing you spent years being embarrassed by that turns out to be exactly who you are.

What makes Konkle interesting — as a writer, as a subject, as someone talking about clothes — is that she's never performing nonchalance. The jeans are a splurge she justifies out loud. The crystals are a contradiction she owns without resolving. The memoir took four years and made her realize her parents were "doing their best from their own history of trauma." None of it is tidy, and she doesn't try to make it so.

The most compelling thing a woman can wear, it turns out, is the willingness to stop pretending her life is coherent — and dress accordingly.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.