My Friend Anna: The True Story of the Fake Heiress Who Conned Me and Half of New York City

Like the author’s relationship with the subject, Anna Delvey, my feelings about this book are all over the place. I found the beginning equal parts boring and repulsive, as she describes in insipid detail how she “brilliantly" made her way up from her Southern upbringing (which she presents alternately as either provincial and limiting, or wholesome and loving, depending on which she needs to move her story along and make you feel the most sorry for her) to a “fabulous" life in Manhattan as a photo editor for the appropriately named Vanity Fair. And when I say insipid detail, I mean it. Here’s a typical passage:“As usual, I went to work at Vanity Fair’s headquarters, now located on the forty-first floor of One World Trade Center, the tallest building in the United States, into which Conde Nast had moved two years prior. I spent the morning catching up on my expenses: tracking down receipts for charges that had been made on my credit card before and during photo shoots. I taped down each receipt, carefully entered its details into an online portal, and then typed in the assignment code that tied each charge to it corresponding project. I finished the report after lunch, scanned in the receipts, and clicked 'Submit.’”Does anyone care? I don’t, but just as I’m nodding off, I get nauseated as I read her describe in just as much detail something that would appeal only to readers of a gossip column, about who was seen with whom wearing what in which exclusive here-today-gone-tomorrow bar/nightclub/restaurant. A few pages of this is enough to make we want to grow out a mullet and start driving a pickup with two labs in the back with a shotgun. There is nothing even remotely appealing about this Young Social Climber’s Guide To Life In Manhattan to me, at least not how she writes it, as the vapidity of the people and the scene are perfectly captured by the equally vapid writing.All of this is just filler anyway while we wait to meet the star herself, the mysterious “German heiress” who we know is going to Young Pretty White Girl her way through these people’s lives in a way that will upend them all. When she finally makes her appearance, tho, it’s anticlimactic. She’s not half as exciting on these pages as we’d imagine. Where is the rush and explosiveness that she brought to the party? If we were still back in the author’s hometown of Knoxville, I might more easily believe that yet another scenester wearing just the right everything could seduce people. But maybe that’s it—the author might as well be back home, because she admits that Anna’s care-free, live-for-today ethic was seductive to her.But it still wasn’t really that interesting. There were no midnight swims in city fountains wearing $10,000 dresses or last-minute helicopter rides to private jets to lunch in Paris. There was just “let’s order another bottle of white wine even though it’s a school night” mixed with a general sloppy approach to affairs that reminds me more of a typical young person’s inattention to detail than a true devil-may-care attitude.Yet it still worked. In time, the author counted Anna as a BFF who she went with to spas, bars, restaurants, and exclusive workout sessions. Her very own season of Sex In the City.It doesn’t really go south for the author until she agrees to go to Marrakesh with Delvey and a few other last-minute pick-ups (along the way we get invested in, then immediately forget, various hanger-ons, like the girl who worked at Anna’s hotel who was an aspiring filmmaker, who got herself uninvited because of indiscreet tweets—the only time in history someone’s life turned out better because of Twitter). It’s in Marrakesh that, through a series of unfortunate events, the author manages to charge more than a year’s salary onto two different Amex cards for the vacation: paying for flights, tours, dinners, and the entire $7,500/night resort fee.The next part of the story we’ve all already read in less bloated ways in various magazine articles a year ago: the empty promises to wire money, each time delayed by a new excuse; the eventually broken and disheveled Delvey sleeping on her marks' couches, crying about how her trust fund is locked up and her parents won’t help; the incredibly slow but inevitable realization they were all the victims of a long con.And finally, the book gets interesting. The author talks less and less about herself and her job, her family, and other things we don’t really care about (though she never completely stops—so glad I know all about the technical details of a photo shoot Annie Leibowitz did at a conference hosted by the magazine, with yet more dropped names like Larry David and John Kerry), and instead talks more about her experiences trying to get authorities to look into Delvey as a possible con artist. They cared only after hotels and banks pressed charges, and even then it took time for her to find the right people to tell her story to. One of them winds up enlisting her in a sting, getting her to arrange an assignation with Delvey in LA where she’s somehow hiding out in a $60K/month rehab clinic in Beverly Hills (probably looking for new rich marks to fleece) so they can arrest her and bring her back to NYC to face charges. This part is both frustrating and nail-biting, as it unfolds slowly with the author working her own con—the idea that she still trusts Anna and wants to be friends with her.Only at the end, in the final pages, do I feel empathy for the author. She points out that while the rest of us were laughing at how some hapless hack from a small Russian town pretending to be a German trust fund kid from Cologne fleeced the NY art scene that wouldn’t let us behind their velvet ropes, the boutique hotels that wouldn’t rent us their rooms, and the banks that wouldn’t give us a car loan, she herself was really just a small-time worker-bee on a modest salary trying to have fun in NY in the final days of her youthful 20s who trusted the wrong person and lost two years of her life due to the resulting stress. It’s easy, as Anna’s defense lawyer said during his cross-examination, to think, “this is the greatest thing that ever happened to her” because she has a book and movie deal about her close encounter with someone the world can’t get enough of. Gone are the days of being a nobody assistant editor; the author can now look forward to TV interviews and invitations to all the right parties as a guest instead of as staff.But really, the book shows us just how sad this all was. Her amazing job at Vanity Fair was just her being a functionary making phone calls to order coffee and hair appointments. The famous people she met in her job quickly forgot her name after the photo shoots. In the end she got laid off like everyone else when the long-time editor retired. And her nights out were vapid empty wastes of time and money with people who came and went in places that were trendy for a day before closing shop and being replaced with the next generation of cool kids. Her go-getter friend giving her the juice she thought she wanted in NYC was a fraud, and her last two years of her fun-loving twenties were spent on the phone screaming at Amex to reverse the charges. That she got a book and movie deal out of this is just making the best of a bad situation. While she eventually got those hotel charges dropped from her credit card, and apparently made enough money in advances to pay off the loans she took from friends to cover the rest, she will never get back the trust she once had and will forever wonder with each new potential friend—is this person for real?So in the end I sympathized with the author. (I still don't like her, but I do sympathize.) I’ve had my trust destroyed too—not in a con, but a bad relationship. But the effects are the same. You start playing your cards closer to your chest. You say less and trust less and do less. You lay awake at 3am kicking yourself years—decades—later for being such a dupe. She has this to look forward to. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It reminds us that Anna Delvey isn’t a joke any more than Ted Bundy. She’s a sociopath just the same, destroying lives, caring only for herself, without a single tear shed for any of her victims. May she spend all 12 years in jail, away from the rest of us (by then hopefully her looks will be gone and so the #freeanna crowd will no longer find her an appealing cause).I just think that as a book, this could have benefitted from some cold-hearted editing. I will look forward to reading other accounts of Delvey’s antics that hopefully did.

I will admit that it was a quick read, and absolutely is a gossip column narrative disguised as a book. But another reviewer hit the nail on the head when they wrote that "This book is an insult to the real book writers out there."The author clearly thinks herself a Jane Eyre-esque, long-suffering martyr, who heroically got a career working her way up from her poverty of upper-class white Southerners who casually... have their own island in South Carolina where they summer? Wow, so difficult, what a hero. *eye roll* But of course, she sees herself as someone who's beat all odds, and the world as cruel for not condemning to death the girl who came into her life and took advantage of her pretty young white girl's inability to say no.Is it a sh*tty situation? Absolutely. But her martyring self-pity, mixed with her own bloated sense of pride and defensive stance because "the world is against her" really makes me hate her more that the fraudster by the end.Depending on who's contract you want to support, wait for the Netflix series or the movie. And if you want the double-standard description of details for both contracts, read the last chapter of the book, I guess.

I’ve been chewing on this book for a while. Not because I liked it, but because of its unbearable bleakness. Look, this book was always bound to be bleak despite the tawdry true-crime appeal of Anna Delvey. But I truly could not have anticipated a more demoralizing or dystopian portrait of youth in the big city in twenty-first century. Williams’ world is one where everyone is underpaid and overworked, to the point where people abruptly drop off the map, where dream jobs still leave you with double digits in your bank account and the appearance of scrappiness and humility matters far more than the possession of them. I mean, even before Anna begins paying for everything, Williams spends triple digits on single yoga classes and spa visits. I’m not so cruel as to judge her for her spending; I spend my money on silly things all the time. But it’s a stark portrait of the specific kind of status-consciousness that people like Williams wears like an affliction. We work in glamorous industries in a large city rife with excesses of old and new money alike. Hot new brunch spots compete with old world glamour and have one thing in common: you aren’t the person who can access them. Maybe if you wore a Batsheva Hay dress and a Susan Alexandra handbag and Intentionally Blank mules. Maybe if you were thinner or had the hair lasered off your chin or purified your insides with $15 Sweetgreen salads or weekly infrared sessions. The prospect of an easy ticket to status (and not just normal status, but the status to like, wear sweatpants to Le Coucou and be let in anyway!) and a key to those closed-off places is intoxicating. In a setting like this, the question isn’t “how could anyone get fooled by Anna Delvey”, but rather “how could you not?” Typical story of a young "know it all" that enjoyed the lime light whilst making bad decisions and can't own up to her mistakes but wants other people to pay for her debts. This book is an insult to the real book writers out there.

I was excited to read this book about being part of the rich and fabulous in NYC and about the author's friendship with the fake con woman Anna Delvy, but was honestly just bored most of the time. It was full of mundane and monotonous details and I skimmed so many pages. I thought I would sympathize with the author Rachel but did not feel sorry for her at all. She literally kept pulling out her card and paying for things every time Anna "lost or forgot" her card and promised to pay her back. Who does that more than once or twice?? Especially when the tab was $36,000 or whatever it was. Then we're supposed to feel outraged along with the author that Anna couldn't pay her back. Duh. I'll definitely watch the HBO show though!

I rarely write any reviews, especially of a book but I feel quite strongly about this one for reasons I can’t quite identify. I think the story itself is interesting although ultimately it spanned a very short period of time. The rest of the book seems to be very much focused around the author’s constant drive to show herself in the best light. It felt like a never ending barrage of “look how amazing/kind/honest/loyal I am” to the point where I utterly disliked Rachel by the end. I was relieved to get to the end of the story.

Let me give you some quotes from my book group who all read this:'I returned it to Kindle as I didn't want it in my book list''It is an abomination to trees''I would like to get transferred to prison to paper cut her with this book'Whoever wrote these other reviews must have read a totally different book. This is without doubt the worst book I have ever read. It scored 4 out of 80 at my book group (and most people only scored it 1 to give themselves a point for reading it). You could remove all the pages between the first and last chapter and it may have made it more readable.I felt about this book as I did watching the Fyre Festival documentary - a lack of sympathy and also joy at idiots getting what they deserve. When someone asked me who I like more, Anna or Rachel, I had to say Rachel as at least she was punctual for meetings. That was the only redeeming feature she had.I am unsure what the purpose of this book was for her and I don't know who was actually interested in this awful, repetitive story. Don't read this if you think you are going to hear about how Anna managed to build up her reputation and all of the things she did. It covers none of that.The only thing I am left with is a sense of rage that the credit card company actually wrote off her debt.

Compulsive reading! I read the book in a day, but then, I love books like this, about con artists and especially true stories. It was very well written. I thought that Rachael acted like a free loader and I didn’t feel especially sorry for her. I would have felt very uncomfortable going out for meals at posh places I couldn’t afford, letting someone else constantly pick up the tab. I wouldn’t have wanted all the high end treatments and gym sessions if I couldn’t pay for them myself. I am way to independent a person for that! So I wouldn’t have been going on that holiday and so, that couldn’t have happened to me. That said, when the situation arose and she stupidly agreed to a massive amount being put on her card, I did feel sorry for her, because she trusted her ‘friend’. And who hasn’t trusted a friend before and found that they shouldn't have been trusted after all?. It does mess with you head for many months. I know it was a real book, so it had to follow what happened but maybe with a bit of artistic licence a film would have a big showdown at the end. Exciting stuff! Loved it and would recommend!

This book is an addictive read. It is grammatically well written and interesting, even if I didn’t entirely feel sympathetic at all times to the author. It was compelling enough to continue reading on the beach and I finished it in less than 24 hours. I do think that Rachel was deceived and manipulated, however she perhaps should have questioned herself sooner about whether it was morally right to allow a friend to continually pay for social activities. She could have reciprocated expensive dinners with an invite to cook for her friend. The willingness to let a friend continually pay for her without offering anything in return, apart from tagging along for the ride, seems exploitative. However, Anna was fundamentally dishonest in her friendship with Rachel and indeed manipulated her into paying for the holiday. It seems to me that Anna is clearly mentally unwell and in need of professional help. I think Rachel is correct in her suspicions that Anna has a personality disorder. It is sad that Anna has clearly come so far from her own family and that they have not been able, or perhaps willing to get her the psychological/psychiatric treatment needed earlier in her life to avoid this destructive pattern of behaviour.

You know when you really look forward to something and then it’s a bit...meh? Well this book was just that. I'd seen it on peoples Bookstagram's for a while and really wanted to ready it, so when I got offered the chance via NetGalley and the publisher, I jumped at the chance.Maybe its the Yorkshire in me but I really couldn’t believe that someone (i.e. Rachel, i.e. the author) had fallen for this crazy woman’s scams for so long? I mean fool me once, but twice and a third time...$70,000 dollars worth of fooling??? No I'm sorry. Whilst I have sympathy for what Rachel went through, I thought she came across as very gullible, naive and a little bit whiney.The book itself dragged on way too long for my liking. I think the author went into way too much minute detail about every little thing and often at her own expense as she just came off as more and more naïve. I may not move in the New York social scene but what on earth was it going to take for her to wake up and smell the coffee?I’m glad that she eventually got the justice she craved( and deserved), but I think the book was a stretch too far and should have been kept for a dinner party story.