She acts like an alien who learned about how humans behave and interact solely by watching a lot of TV—especially the ads, but also daytime game shows, wacky children's programming on Nickelodeon, late-night infomercials, the Home Shopping Network, and shows that showcased glitzy celebrity lifestyles. Oh, and maybe the occasional Lifetime movie, for that touch of extra pathos she couldn't get from substance-abuse PSAs.
So much of her behavior is so canned and fake, and feels like something I've seen on TV, but it just seems to spill right out of her, unscripted. And that makes me wonder if she was such a dorky outcast, she spent most of her childhood being socialized by the TV, instead of friends or siblings.
Her mom wasn't in good health, and her dad was probably doing the trad dad thing of working a lot so he could make more money, and leaving his increasingly sick and obese wife to oversee the children's upbringing. Anna acts like a kid who needed a lot more attention and engagement than she was getting (some kids are just higher-demand than others), and her means of acting out in order to get that was to be a clown and a performer, doing shit she'd seen on TV.
I do wonder if there was something going on in her family in her toddler/early childhood years where her socialization was hindered or disrupted for an extended period of time—some sort of crisis where everybody was too distracted to give Anna the kind of attention and socialization with other kids she needed, so she spent a lot of time being babysat by the TV, and learning about how people behave from that.
A huge amount of our ability to recognize social cues, learn empathy and reciprocity, understand boundaries, and learn emotional regulation in interpersonal contexts develops during that time, and kids who don't get proper socialization by the time they're four have a really hard time thereafter—there's a developmental window that closes right about the time most kids enter preschool. That period is also where Narcissism appears to have its origin (which gets hardened into place in adolescence unless there are proper interventions through childhood, which is why adult Narcs so often seem to veer between screaming toddlers and snotty 14-year-olds in their behavior).
So maybe she was a small child who got attention and praise for precociously parroting things she'd seen on TV. Maybe the behavior she's engaging in now, as an adult, was her best means of getting positive attention from the adults around her when she was three or four—and nobody stepped in and said, "Yes, that's funny, but there's a time and place for it," and then proceeded to give her consistent positive attention for normal, non-attention-seeking behavior.
We'll probably never know, but her degree of attention-seeking (and how she goes about it), social cluelessness, and narcissism all seem to point in that general direction.
