My Friend Anna
The true story of Anna Delvey, the fake heiress of New York City
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Narrated by:
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Rachel DeLoache Williams
About this listen
One of Time magazine's must-read books of 2019.
With a new and exclusive afterword.
How does it feel to be betrayed by your closest friend?
A close friend who turns out to be the most prolific grifter in New York City....
This is the true story of Anna Delvey, the fake heiress whose dizzying deceit and elaborate con-artistry deceived the Soho hipster scene before her ruse was finally and dramatically exposed.
After meeting through mutual friends, the 'Russian heiress' Anna Delvey and Rachel DeLoache Williams soon became inseparable. Theirs was an intoxicating world of endless excess: high dining, personal trainer sessions, a luxury holiday...and Anna footed almost every bill.
But after Anna's debit card was declined in a Moroccan medina whilst on holiday in a five-star luxury resort, Rachel began to suspect that her increasingly mysterious friend was not all she seemed.
This is the incredible story of how Anna Sorokin conned the high-rollers of the NYC social scene and convinced her close friend of an entirely concocted fantasy, the product of falsified bank documents, bad cheques and carefully edited online photos.
Written by Rachel DeLoache Williams, the Vanity Fair photography editor who believed Anna's lies before helping the police to track her down (fittingly, deciphering Anna's location using Instagram), this is Catch Me If You Can with Instagram filters.
Between Anna, Fyre Festival's Billy McFarland (Anna even tried to scam Billy) and Elizabeth Holmes, whose start-up app duped the high and mighty of Silicon Valley, this is the year of the scammer.
©2019 Rachel DeLoache Williams (P)2019 Simon & SchusterCritic reviews
"'A Catch Me If You Can for the internet age... What Anna did was make Instagram flesh." (Guardian)
"At a time when we are obsessed with true-crime...Anna Sorokin is the real deal. That doesn't make it right. But oh, it tastes good." (Pandora Sykes, Elle)
"Anna looked at the soul of New York and recognized that if you distract people with shiny objects, they will be virtually unable to see anything else. And the thing was: it was so easy." (New York Magazine)
Pretty good
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I stuck with this to the end through a sense of compulsion because the author does so much dissembling herself - she's a poor girl who would love you to think she got an entry level job at Vanity Fair through hard work and sending a couple of nice emails whilst talking about her family's access to private islands and running for Congress. She is also spectacularly dim or believes her audience to be so, apparently happy to have expensive meals and personal training thrown at her for free and is the very last person to suspect that this might not be above board.
I cannot possibly recommend this audiobook at face value but there is merit at looking at this with some detachment and questioning.
Compelling but not for the right reasons
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fascinating life lesson
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Extraordinary story & equally frustrating!
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absolutely brilliant. gripping account
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