It's Like Our Sleepover (with Anna Konkle)
Be There in Five
Kate Kennedy
4.9 ā¢ 7.3K Ratings
šļø 21 June 2026
ā±ļø 102 minutes
šļø Recording | iTunes | RSS
š§¾ļø Download transcript
Summary
This week, Kate chats with PEN15 co-creator Anna Konkle for a conversation that's equal parts silly and heavy, like the last two people awake at a sleepover asking about the meaning of life and swapping stories of their first thong. They discuss Anna's new memoir,Ā The Sane One, and how it explores a different kind of nostalgia than her previous work, touching on topics like the grief, estrangement, and reconciliation that anchor the book, hand-slapping games like Miss Mary Mack, the kind of love for your child that's so pure it almost scares you, and what it was like to be chosen as a Filene's Basement model. Along the way, they dive into the surprising relationship between the academia of clowning and playing a 13-year-old in PEN15, reminisce about AIM, Disney Channel free previews, sleepover paranormal rituals, and spiral about gentle parenting and the importance of boredom. It's a conversation about memories, motherhood, creativity, and all the tiny emotional truths that never quite leave us, with detours more random than Kate Bosworth showing up at your local Relay for Life. Enjoy!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Be There in Five podcast. I'm Kate Kennedy, your host. |
| 0:14.4 | I want to too long with an intro today because we have a fun conversation to get to. |
| 0:18.2 | I was so excited to have the opportunity to talk to somebody I |
| 0:21.3 | really admire whose body of work I love who wrote a show that like means so much to me. And I think |
| 0:26.1 | a lot of us millennials who are nostalgia enthusiasts who love celebrations of girlhood. |
| 0:32.4 | And today I'm talking with Anna Conkel, who is one of the co-creators of Penn 15, a show that was so |
| 0:37.2 | brilliantly done, |
| 0:38.3 | really served as like a time capsule that didn't like reduce or trivialize millennial girlhood. |
| 0:44.3 | And in a really interesting way where Anna and her writing partner and co-creator Maya, they |
| 0:48.9 | played the 13-year-old girls so they could explore like some of the trickier topics that you |
| 0:52.5 | wouldn't want to with like actual minors. And it just wasn't a really creative way to approach a show about millennial tweens |
| 0:59.1 | and kind of just had that like healing nature that even like you know turning red that Pixar movie |
| 1:04.6 | like i just love things that really take girlhood seriously and that find a humor in it but in a way |
| 1:10.7 | that's not |
| 1:11.3 | reductive or dismissive. And I just, pen 15 means everything to me. But also, I didn't want to just talk to her about pen 15 because it's kind of like when people only ask me about the torments because like it's like one of the first things I did, but it's not like the only thing I've done. And specifically, we're also talking to her about her memoir, the same one. that is a really like candid, touching, funny and also at |
| 1:30.6 | times pretty serious exploration of family dynamics, of complicated parental relationships, |
| 1:37.2 | of her being the more stable one that was kind of parentified and not understanding that until |
| 1:40.7 | she was a little bit older. And appropriately for Father's Day, because I don't feel like we always, I think Mother's Day and Father's Day, they're kind of these like holidays that can be so sweet and fun. |
| 1:50.2 | But they are also homework holidays that like you don't have to attach a meaning to, but they can bring up a lot of weird feelings because not everybody has a straightforward relationship with their mother or father. |
| 1:59.6 | A lot of people are grieving their, the loss of their parents, a lot of just as many people |
| 2:04.1 | that call their parents on these days, there are people that aren't able to call them or are |
| 2:08.7 | choosing not to for valid reasons. |
... |
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