Rachel DeLoache WilliamsBesprekingen

The story was interesting but felt too crowded with details on where everyone was going and what they were doing there. I found myself skimming entire pages trying to get to the meat of the story.

So I read this book after watching the Netflix dramatic film, Inventing Anna which was based on a New Yorker article, not on this book. This memoir is a very interesting story of a young scam artist, Anna, who managed to con a lot of people (and financial institutions) written by one of her victims. Unfortunately, it's really not as entertaining as the film.

I'm bemused by the fact that I felt Rachel (the author) was portrayed more sympathetically in the Netflix documentary than she was in her own memoir. After watching, Inventing Anna, I truly felt sorry for Rachel. She was scammed by a friend into picking up an enormous hotel bill, and I could totally see how that could happen. The film made me believe that there truly was a friendship between Anna and Rachel, and that Rachel didn't just care about living NY life in the fast lane with someone who provided entry into that world. Rachel seemed more innocent.

In the memoir, Rachel indicates that she felt sorry for Anna because she seemed lonely, and that most of the relationship was based on her extreme empathy for Anna. So the friendship seems more contrived, more unequal, and less likely. Which unfortunately does give the reader a feeling of "what exactly did you like about this woman beyond her money?".

Regardless of how I felt about the author, she is a victim of a very persuasive scammer, and I definitely felt sorry for the four months she spent trying to get paid back and the stress she must have been under with these giant credit card bills and no great way to extricate herself from the debt. Of course in hindsight, most readers are going to feel she made some huge mistakes and ignored some giant red flags, but don't sociopaths always do a great job using charm and persuasion to get their victims to acquiesce to their desires.

A fascinating story, but personally, I'd watch it on Netflix and skip the book.

While the story was so interesting and one I didn’t know, it did go one for a tick too much. Since the reader knows it is about a con, we know the end, so to keep printing text after text conversations, it got a bit much. The story though kept me going while wanting to see Anna get what was coming. I’d library it.

Fieldnotes:
New York City/Marrakech, 2016-2019

1 Fake Heiress
1 Narrator with an Agenda
62k Credit Card Debt

Lies Upon Lies
1 Court Case
1 Vanity Fair Article

Names Dropped All Over the Floor

The Short Version:
I came to this knowing nothing about Anna Delvey, the fake German heiress who apparently left a string of unpaid hotel and restaurant bills in her wake - and who was turned in by a former friend who was left footing the exorbitant bill from a Moroccan luxury hotel.

Never has it been more clear to me when reading a memoir that there is a purpose, an intention, a goal behind writing a memoir. In Rachel Williams' case? To convince everyone (possibly including herself) that she was the victim because of her good nature - and not because she was fascinated by/greedy for the high life and made (understandable) mistakes accordingly.

Rachel spends a lot of time talking about how she is so shy and quiet and processes things internally - and that she didn't turn to others to help sort out her looming debts because of this. Of course, she has now written a Vanity Fair article and this memoir, which isn't the most supportive evidence. She also name-drops celebrities, restaurants, photographers.

All this did was remind me that she was in her mid/late 20s and thought anyone outside of that bubble cared about any of those things. It's hard for me to get worked up about how she's "broke" while she simultaneously talks about "lunching" at 5 star hotels and how her father is running for office. I would have had more sympathy if at any point she had acknowledged that she got caught up in the "VIP treatment". Instead she spent a lot of pages crying that the police implied that maybe she wasn't such a victim - since she actually went on the luxury vacation and signed the credit card slip that she now didn't want to pay for. And she definitely lost me when she acted as if cyberstalking Anna's social media and screenshotting everything and forwarding the vaguebooking to the DA to "demonstrate Anna's insensitivity" meant the DA asked if she had considered a career in investigation...½

2.25

Shallow. The community surrounding this, Anna, the author and even the story itself seems to define shallow. The writing wasnt terrible. I will give it that. It was well paced and easy to devour. However, after reading this I can say I entered not knowing much about Anna, and finished in the same position.

The only elements of substance in this book is the naivety and continual lack of astuteness on behalf of the author. Unwitting? If so it is to a to a glaring fault. The entire book smacks of a name dropping lack of awareness. If anything, this book is a testament to how privilege can stunt you. Bailed out constantly, the author entered this story in a life without consequence and left much the same way.

Quick and interesting read. Having just finished the Netflix series about Delvey, this gave a slightly different perspective with more detail into the actual correspondence and texts between Anna and Rachel.

I’ve got to say that I didn’t really keep up with the Anna Delvey scandal when it happened. I read a few articles but got distracted by other shiny things on the internet. A book is the better way to capture my attention and who closer to the story to tell it but Rachel, Anna’s friend. Rachel also ended up footing the bill for an extravagant stay in Marrakech after Anna’s cards were declined. This set off alarm bells that something wasn’t quite right with Anna’s claim to money and ended with a trial and conviction.

It’s a very detailed story, with transcripts of text message exchanges and emails. It starts when things started to fall apart for Anna and Rachel’s friendship in Marrakech. Anna had always been the one to pay for everything – personal trainers, dinners and drinks that Rachel couldn’t always afford on her salary. Anna had always been somewhat flaky when it came to a range of things according to Rachel – time management, being nice to staff in hotels and restaurants and making definite plans. But this trip sounded off alarm bells from the beginning and Rachel ended up paying for the trip across her personal and corporate credit cards. What started as a friendship started to crumble as Anna becomes more and more evasive about paying the money back. Rachel is desperate and in huge amounts of debt. How can she get paid?

Much has been said about each person’s motivations, but I feel it’s important to remember that these are all real people (who we don’t know personally). Yes, perhaps Rachel was naïve but I’m sure we’ve all had friends we knew were bad for us and fallen for something stupid before. Anna was happy to treat her to all sorts of things and Rachel didn’t question it early on. Anna is portrayed as blunt, rude and dismissive at times in the book but there seems to be some magnetism that draws Rachel to her blasé. The bigger scandal was that Anna had fabricated her past and was financing her lavish lifestyle by bouncing cheques between banks, resulting in multiple charges.

The story is very, very detailed, possibly because of the file Rachel puts together to document everything that’s happened. Sometimes it’s a little too much, but perhaps that’s the catharsis Rachel needed. It’s the story of being fooled by money and glamour alongside a spectacular fraud.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com

this book stressed me out! I actually had to read the end first to make sure things turned out mostly okay. Fraud stories are my favorite true crime stories, which is why I was drawn to this book. This is a very introspective and well-written perspective of what it's like being a victim of this kind of crime. I vaguely remembered hearing about the trial when this is happening but I really didn't know much about it. It was very interesting to hear from someone so close to the story. If you're interested in fraud crimes, I think you'll like this book.

Really enjoyed this account of a young woman who is befriended by a wealthy heiress and taken for a ride. So much unbelievable stuff happened, it got hard to put down toward the end.

This book is both extremely entertaining & extremely tedious, and includes CSI-level detail about what people were wearing, eating, drinking, whatever, and sentences like "The food was arranged buffet style to encourage socializing." The author takes pains to identify Anna Delvey as status-seeking, name-dropping, etc., but I'm gonna be a real bitch for a second & say that you don't get to be $65k in the hole w/ A.D. without having something in common.

I was blown away by how much money this woman got away with stealing, because that is what she did, she stole. Thousands upon thousands of dollars just out of thin air and in her pocket again and again. I just can't wrap my head around how someone was able to do it for so long without getting caught. And then the final question at trial, did she do it maliciously with the intent of ruining other people's lives or was she just going through the motions of stealing money not caring about anyone but herself. I guess those are one in the same in a sense because she only cared about living the lifestyle she thought she deserved. On top of that, I cannot even begin to imagine the panic that Rachel felt on a daily basis while fighting with AMEX and wrestling with the idea that her friend, someone she really thought was her friend, stole her money and didn't think twice about it at all. With all of that said, I feel like this book could have been a little bit better with a little more editing. There was a chapter or two in the end that I could have done without that just repeated the fact that she spent the time writing and going back and forth with AMEX. I think we all know that AMEX isn't going to just credit an account without making someone jump through several hoops they've lit on fire. But it was just the same stuff over and over while I was wanting to know what was going on with Anna. Did Beth fall for her scheme? How many of Rachel's friends were conned out of money too? Did Anna ever find out that Rachel had a bigger role in her arrest than she might have originally thought prior to trial? Did Rachel ever consider suing the hotel that told her she wasn't going to be charged and then charged her credit card anyways? What happened to Anna after she was convicted, did anyone of her "friends" talk to her? Sure, I can find out all of this by a little bit of research on the computer, but I was expecting more of an epilogue explaining the fall of the fake heiress. I am still a little torn on a 2 or 3 star rating, because I feel like this book could have shown me a little bit more and I also wrestled with the fact that how could Rachel not see something was off sooner, but there were moments that were very well written and portrayed the feelings of the whole ordeal, which leads me to the 3 stars. I would be curious to read Anna's side of the story though, but would I be able to believe it? Probably not.

I sped right through this book! Rachel's story of her friendship with this con artist is interesting & fitting for today. My sympathies were certainly with her, her story of her life in New York with Anna combines sympathy and skepticism for her naivete and desire for a bit of the good life.