Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

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.