My Friend Anna: The True Story of a Fake Heiress — The Con Artist You're Not Expecting

Everyone I know who listened to this was obsessed with Anna Delvey. Fascinated by her audacity, her vision-board energy, her absolute refusal to be embarrassed. And I get it - I really do. But here's the thing nobody warned me about: I spent most of this 9 hours furious at Rachel. Not Anna.

I was in the middle of a logo revision project that was making me want to throw my Wacom tablet out the window, so I threw on this audiobook as a change of pace. Big mistake. Big. I couldn't focus on bezier curves because I kept pausing to stare at my wall like what is happening right now.

The Con Isn't What You Think It Is

Everybody comes to this book for Anna Delvey - the fake German heiress, the audacious scammer, the woman who somehow convinced New York's most status-conscious circles that she was worth impressing. And Anna delivers. The Marrakech section alone - watching Rachel narrate the slow-motion horror of her credit cards getting charged, first flights, then meals, then their $7,500-per-night villa, each charge preceded by Anna's breezy assurances - is genuinely anxiety-inducing. I felt my own chest tightening. That specific escalation, the way Anna kept moving the goalposts just slightly enough that no single moment felt like the obvious time to say stop, is the most chilling part of the whole story.

But the real psychological portrait here is Rachel. And that's where it gets complicated.

She's so earnest. So painfully, almost aggressively earnest about documenting every detail - every dinner, every excuse Anna made, every red flag she half-noticed and then talked herself out of. The granularity is both the book's greatest strength and its most frustrating quality. You understand exactly how smart people get conned, because you watch a clearly intelligent woman rationalize her way past about forty-seven moments where any of us would've said actually, I'm good. That's valuable. That's the real cautionary tale.

Rachel Narrating Rachel: A Whole Situation

Okay. I have to be honest about the narration because it is genuinely divisive and I am not going to pretend it isn't.

Rachel DeLoache Williams narrating her own memoir is an interesting choice that works about 70% of the time. The authenticity is real - when she recounts the Marrakech panic, there's a shaky quality to her voice that no hired narrator could've manufactured. The occasional embarrassed little laugh she lets out when describing her own naivety? Genuinely affecting. It made me feel like I was sitting across from her at a bar, watching her relive something that still makes her cringe.

But. BUT. There is a voice she does - a kind of softened, slightly childlike register she slips into during certain emotional beats - that drove me absolutely up the wall. Some reviewers called it a "toddler voice" and look, that's harsh, but I understand the frustration. It undercuts the moments when she needs you to take her distress seriously. It made me feel, at times, like she was performing victimhood rather than just... being in it. And that's a problem when the entire book is asking you to empathize with her.

Julia Whelan, this is not. (I say that with love and with the full acknowledgment that I am perhaps unreasonably attached to Julia Whelan.)

The narration is not bad. It's specific and human and occasionally really moving. It's just uneven in a way that a professional narrator would've smoothed out.

Who This Book Is Actually For

If you want to understand the Anna Delvey story from the inside - not the Netflix dramatization, not the think-pieces, but the actual texture of what it felt like to be in that friendship - this is the one. Rachel's photo-editor eye for detail means you get everything. What Anna ordered. What she was wearing. The exact wording of the texts. It's almost too much detail, and then suddenly it's exactly the right amount, because you realize the accumulation is the point.

If you're coming purely for Anna as a charismatic villain to root for, you might be frustrated. This is Rachel's book, Rachel's humiliation, Rachel's attempt to make sense of something that genuinely doesn't make complete sense. Anna stays somewhat opaque throughout - which is probably accurate, but might disappoint listeners who wanted more access to the con artist's interiority.

Abuela would've had opinions about this one. She understood women who do what they have to do to get what they want - she watched enough telenovelas to recognize the archetype. But she also had zero patience for people who didn't protect themselves. She would've clicked her tongue at Rachel's credit card statements and then immediately demanded to know what happened next.

Listen to this one during daylight hours when you can pace around your apartment and mutter to yourself. Not recommended for late-night listening unless you want to lie awake thinking about how many red flags you've ignored in your own life.