to all the boys i scammed before

inventing anna and teenage scammers,

Julia Garner as Anna Delvy in Netflix’s Inventing Anna

Hello friends—-

First some news. My collection Filthy Animals was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and was named a finalist for The Story Prize in the last couple of weeks. Very exciting. This book means the world to me—short stories are my first and true love, and having my collection recognized is such a tremendous honor.

Also, I’ll have some news re: new publications soon, I think.

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On Friday, I flew back from Nashville and spent the whole day in a post-travel fugue. So I watched all of the Inventing Anna series on Netflix. Though watch is perhaps not the right word. A lot of it was just kind of on while I played Crusader Kings 3.

Inventing Anna follows Vivian Knight, a journalist, as she tries to break the story of Anna Delvy, who has recently been arraigned for fraud and theft. It turns out that Ms. Delvy had gone around New York pretending to be a German heiress about to come into her $67 million trust fund. On the back of this lie, she stayed in expensive hotels, schmoozed with artists and bankers and philanthropists alike, bilking them for hundreds of thousands of dollars while leaving a slew of confused, embarrassed members of the New York elite in her wake. By the time Knight gets wind of the story, she’s intrigued by what she sees as a feminist antihero. A smart, canny woman capable of great things. She wants to write a story that cuts against the narrative of the “dumb, scheming socialite” that the rest of the press is quick to seize upon. What follows is eight episodes of flashbacks and interviews as Knight tries to get closer to the woman behind the mystery, only to discover that the truth is ever more complicated and shifting. Oh, yeah, it’s based on the real Anna Delvy/Anna Sorokina story from a few years ago.

It all sounds like it would make a great show. I mean, you have lies, deception, ambition, and a cadre of multi-ethnic television and movie stars, many of whom belong to the Shondaland repertory. It’s The Great Gatsby but if Daisy were Jay and Jordan were a scrappy, black Nick. And, true, there are occasional moments of brilliance. Julia Garner’s total transformation into Delvy is one for the record books of Netlfix dramas. As Delvy, she pouts and speaks in a terrifying, gravely Russo-German accent. It’s such a curiously big cut of an acting decision for this genre of show. The slickly contemporary streaming drama specializes in the anodyne and self-similar: spare set design, anonymized urban backdrops, flannel and blue jeans to signal working class tired men, Van Heusen shirts tucked in slacks to signal white collar tired men, women in cowl-neck cardigans holding mugs of tea, their wedding rings pointed out at the audience to signal tired women with emotional problems, t-shirts and blouses with French tucked into blue jeans to signal fashionable young woman about town who knows what Twitter is. These characters then act out some tediously written drama whose seams you can see through the sort of okay cinematography. A raft of such shows and films drift down to us month in and month out, and we fall into them and into the next and into the next, our expectations always a little low and therefore met. It’s the next phase in the life cycle of the Lifetime movie.

But all that aside, we watch because, well, I don’t know, what else are we going to do? That’s fine. Modest aspirations. I get it. The well-made play, I’ve gone over it elsewhere. But the issue with Inventing Anna is that it’s just very boring. I mean, she’s a scammer, so what? Vivian attempts to erect her into some kind of feminist symbol for our day and age, but I am not sure it’s there. The show skips over the part where they articulate who we are to be invested in and why. I guess we’re supposed to care that Vivian cares so much. But Vivian is very annoying! And very bad at her job! She gets involved with the subject of her profile. She starts to participate in her defense! She tracks down the woman’s parents in Germany. And then in the end, as the verdicts are being read, she clearly wants Anna to get off free. It’s a curious moment because, well, Anna Delvy did commit fraud. She did steal. These are the facts. They are known. It could be interesting to watch a person want someone to get away with something. But I am not certain the show really articulates why Vivian feels so strongly that Anna should be found not guilty.

Vivian meanwhile gestates a whole human while gestating a long profile for the New York magazine stand-in Manhattan. There are moments she struggles with the impending reality of her child’s birth. Her supportive floppy-haired husband gets flagellated by her bad attitude. He understands. The show winks knowingly—see, women can be kind of dirtbags with hearts of gold too, see, see. Yes, it’s all very The Lost Daughter. It’s all very Kate Chopin. We get it. But the issue is not that Vivian is unlikeable due to her ambition. This is not the case. I love her ambition. I love the complications of it. The issue is that she is annoying, as a character, as a person. Anna Chlumsky, who can do no wrong and manages to find some moments of real human feeling in this dead-end of a script, wheels around with her huge eyes going ever so slightly huger. She does the stiff-jawed resigned patter of the female journalist accustomed to podcast appearances. I worried for her in this role. I kept thinking, she’s going to need a mouthguard after all this. Yet, through it all, the character is just. So very annoying. I mean, she is exhausting to be around. The script offer so little context to understand her issues. Instead, she’s just got a clenched jaw. In the end, she and Delvy connect over, I guess, the ways of the world being cruel to ambitious women. We discover that Vivian was left out to dry by her editor on a previous issue, which led to her career being derailed. Etc. Etc. But also, like, why is this a mystery? Why do we find this out so late?

There are also all of these weird incongruities of tone. Veering from the comedic to the cringe on a dime. It’s like, one minute you’re watching Neff, a young black filmmaker working for a luxury hotel, fall under the thrall of Delvy and you kind of feel for her, but then, she’s upset that their mutual friend called the cops after Delvy stole north of $60K from her? It just does not compute! She is loyal, yes, to a fault. But I am not certain the show actually…dwells in complexity so much as it muddles through actual character development.

Anyway, I did not love the show. But it did get me thinking about all of the times I have been a scammer in my own life.

When I was a teenager, I used to log into AOL and Yahoo chatrooms and pretend that I was a woman in my mid-twenties or early-thirties. I’d talk to men for hours about what they wanted to do to my body and what I wanted to do to theirs. I would find pictures on the internet of women and send these through email or over chat, and the men would send me pictures of them in return. I had a whole roster of aliases and identities. Sometimes, I was a graduate student trying to make my way through a lit PhD. Sometimes I was on a soccer team, worried about my slowly healing ankle. Sometimes I was lonely in my life because my husband was often away. Or sometimes my child was sick and I had to leave for a few days to take care of them but was writing just to say that I was thinking of you.

I did this for the sex, obviously. I wanted the sex. I wanted the men to describe how they wanted me. How hard I made them. How they had been sitting through work all day thinking of me. Thinking of how wet I was. How willing. The men talked about their problems. Their issues. The younger men, in their twenties, talked about how their exes had dumped them. How their parents didn’t understand their passion for music. They would tell me about the hard things that had happened in their lives. They would tell me about how they were afraid they weren’t good enough. I always tried to find a way to make them feel good. And then to make them jealous. Oh, I had to go, I was meeting a friend. Who? Oh, just a friend.

But mostly I wanted the sex and I would sit through any discussion of their feelings, waiting for the moment that they told me that they were hard thinking about me. Would I kiss them if we were in the same place?

Yes, I would.

I spent a lot of time telling men, or people pretending to be men anyway, that I wanted to suck them off. Online, I was in control of what I could do with my body. In real life, I was not. I had a hard time and still have a hard time being in my body during sex. It’s because when I was young, I was molested. This doesn’t happen to everyone who is molested or abused. But it did happen to me. I dissociate. I leave my body. I enter the air and become someone else. As a teenager, it seemed a logical thing to do. To pretend to be someone else in order to have sex in a way that didn’t involve my body.

When the AOL chatrooms shut down, I moved over to message boards. By then, I just wanted to write. So I joined all of these roleplaying boards where you wrote long posts about characters and told stories cooperatively. I was very deep into Harry Potter and Naruto roleplay. Later, real life roleplay. In fact, the first story I ever published was a profile I wrote for a character on one of these sites, changed a little. When I think back to those message board days, I think about all of the lies I told. Like, I would tell people that I lived in Vermont. Or in North Dakota. Because it seemed exotic. Or, I’d pretend that I got very ill one day and was in the hospital. I’d stay away for a few days and come back and type into the chatbox that I was sorry for being away, and send a little text emoticon signaling fatigue and sadness. People would shower me in sympathy. One time, I pretended to have a terminal illness and to pass away. This I conveyed to my message board friends by pretending to be my “mom” telling them the sad news.

One time, I tried to be honest and introduced myself as a black college student who was happy to meet everyone, and you will not believe what happened. They did not believe me. They said it was problematic to pretend to be black. That I shouldn’t say things that were not true. They asked me to post a picture of myself in the chatbox to prove it. That black people didn’t roleplay, and it was weird to pretend otherwise. Can you believe that? After years of lying on the internet, there I was, a freshman in college, telling people that I was black, and they did not believe me! The one thing that was totally unbelievable to this group of people was that a black person could log on to the internet and want to write a character who was sorted into a Ravenclaw. It was one step beyond the imagination. It was easier to pretend to have pediatric cancer than to get these people to believe I was black. But, I mean, the 2000s were a weird time online.

I think I was maybe six years into online roleplay before I met another black person who was, well, to borrow a meme: openly black. She’s still a friend. She’s wonderful. She teaches art.

I was a scammer in school, too. I don’t remember when it started. Maybe it was elementary school? Or primary school? The first time I became aware that I was poor and the kids around me were not. I started pretending to be middle class. I was very good at it by third grade. None of my friends ever came to my house until high school. I was so deeply ashamed of the way we lived. The dying grass. The flat brown fields. The chicken coup. The busted cars. The trailers rusting. The exposed cinderblocks supporting my grandparents’ house. Our lack of internet. Our lack of cable. In school, I never became friends with people who rode my bus because they would see how I lived and would know something about me. That I was poor. That I had to check my bag for roaches every morning. People still told the story of what happened to the boy who had taken out his towel during naptime and there was a small, dead mouse tucked in it. I didn’t want to be like that. I was so deeply ashamed of being poor even though I didn’t really know what it meant.

So I lied. I lied and I concealed. And it was only because I had to ride home with friends after a project in senior year that a friend saw how I lived. The strange thing is that I also saw how they lived and realized that I’d had this idea that I was the only person who was poor in my friend group. This was not true. Some of my friends were poor. Some were upper middle class. Some were just regular. But it’s also true that I was the only black person in my friend group in school, and there is a special kind of shame when you are poor and black and have not yet figured out a robust language to explain yourself to yourself. What I mean is that in school, I had internalized all these toxic ideas about blackness and shame. I had a keen sense of anti-black shame about my race and how it would limit me. But then you outgrow that. Hopefully. You outgrow it and what you feel for your younger self is sadness at how ashamed they felt about things that were nothing to be ashamed of. And for the adults, you feel angry that no one taught you better or taught you to know better. Then, well, it loops around again and you pity the adults too.

Anyway, at a certain point online and in real life, I just pretended to be rich. That I had a rich grandfather who showered me in clothes and toys and items. Who took me on trips to Canada and to France. I pretended we had mastiffs and horses. I pretended that my family had ennui and rich people problems like, our bank accounts were temporarily frozen because my father was in oil in Russia. And people believed me. Not because I was good at lying but because they wanted others to believe them. That’s the thing about the Delvy grift. The people surrounding her in the art world and business world are also fucking scammers. When you’re in a place like that, people give you the benefit of the doubt not because you are charismatic but because the whole enterprise depends upon scamming. In an economy of grift, you pretend that everyone is telling the truth because if you start to pull the string, then whole thing unravels.

When people marvel at the fact that these people were deceived by Anna Delvy, I marvel at the fact that they don’t seem to understand that no one is really fooled. I mean, how is it that a thirteen-year-old black boy from Alabama was turning out a credible impersonation of a white woman named Hannah in the Ozarks for YEARS? Those men knew. Of course they knew. But for a few passionate weeks at a time, they had someone checking in on them. Caring about them. Asking about their feelings. Being turned on by them. They were lonely and I was lonely, and we believed in the delusion together.

But, sometimes the loneliest place to be is at the heart of a scam that everyone knows is a scam. Because you have to keep it going. Everyone is counting on you keeping it going. Even as the stakes get higher and higher. When Delvy kept trying to get the $40 Million loan that would allow her to open her club, if only she could just get it, the scam kept going because people wanted her to get the money. And she almost got it! It all came down, as it always does, to the crucial final verification. The moment when all she had to do to make her dreams come true was provide one little bit of paperwork to substantiate her claims and they would give her all the money she could ever need. Of course she couldn’t. Because she didn’t have a trust fund and no money. And so her scam was suspended in a state of simultaneous belief and disbelief.

When so cornered, the scammer always resorts to deflection. When confronted with declining credit cards and demands for payment, Delvy again and again berates her victims with I sent the wire! The wire was sent! Or she looks hopelessly to her friends, I don’t know what’s going on! Why won’t they take my money! It’s the equivalent of “forgetting your wallet at home” when you go to dinner with someone. Except instead of $30 pasta, it’s a $10K per night stay in Marrakesh that she charges to a friend’s work card.

Back when I was scamming those men, there was always a point when they wanted me to turn on my webcam. Now, in this early phase of social media, webcams were sort of common but mostly they were not. They certainly weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now. It was possible to believe that a person didn’t have a cam. So I’d say that it was broken or that my husband wouldn’t allow me to. I made excuses to not turn on my cam and they accepted these excuses, but there was always a moment when their asking turned to telling and they weren’t willing to believe in the lie anymore. And I’d have to make the woman disappear. The men would always write angry emails. They’d say You’re a fucking dude. You’re a fucking lie. How could you betray me like this? God. I bet you’re just a pervert using me to get off. Sometimes, if I really liked the man and wanted to lie to keep going, I’d write back and be apologetic and explain that I was who I said I was but that I couldn’t use a cam and I didn’t understand why that was so hard or so bad but if they wanted I would not speak to them anymore. And the kind of nutso thing is that the men would buy this. They would say they understood and we’d go back to lovingly describing how we wanted to fuck the shit out of each other.

Deflection. Turn the argument about authenticity into an argument about trust. Don’t you believe in me? In us? Why are you questioning me? A person who wants or needs to believe in the scam will believe in the scam.

But, sometimes, you could tell when the person on the other end of the chat was also a scammer. Certain incongruities in pictures. Why was he never in the same room twice? Why did all of the pictures feature only the back of his head or the neck down? Was that mole present in the other pictures as well? I always got annoyed when the other person was lying. It wasn’t even about the lying. It was that they didn’t care enough about their craft to lie well. I prided myself on the depth of my lies. I always picked pictures of the same person. Was careful to make sure they matched. There were some people, in those early AOL and Yahoo days, who did not apply a similar rigor to their scams. It incensed me. I’d lie in wait for them to slip up, a little contradiction, a little thing that didn’t quite align, and then I’d apply pressure and squeeze them until they popped and came clean or blocked me or both. And I’d make another account just to make sure they knew that I knew that they weren’t who they said they were.

It's funny. It never occurred to me that they might also have been a sixteen year old lonely person. I always presumed that the scammers I exposed were older and knew better. That their lives were good and they had no reason to lie to me. How could they be so cruel and also bad at lying. Didn’t they have a house with two floors and a staircase and a dog and a loving spouse? Didn’t they live in San Francisco or New York or Atlanta? What right did they have to sit on the internet and make up things when their lives were already so good. This is the sad thing about being a scammer. You imagine that everyone else has it so good that their lies feel like a betrayal, pointless. You spend all this energy making a better version of yourself to be among real people, not other phoneys, and yet you find yourself totally surrounded by fakes. There is something so painful about that. So sad. When the scammer realizes they are being scammed in turn.

When Delvy, in the series, finds out that her boyfriend is also a scammer, she gets back at him by tanking his scheme. I recognized this immediately. Like calls to like. I thought, oh yes, she is totally a scammer. She is my sister in the scam. The grift. I know the type. I was the type.

But that’s ultimately why the series feels so flat to me. It captures none of the delicious delusion of being high on your own grift. It’s too credulous a show. Too binary in its assumption of grift vs reality. It misses the frisson of layers of delusion, the way you can get so deep in your own story that you forget yourself and your life. Whenever I logged off of talking to those men, I would go into the kitchen of my parents’ trailer, feeling the dirt underfoot, and I’d open the cabinet and shake the roaches out of the cup. I’d rinse it in the tap that only had cold water, no hot. And I’d drink some water and think about how I was loved by some rock climbing enthusiast in Colorado. Meanwhile, there was a hole in the back hall from mildewed and collapsed tile and there was stale bathwater in plastic bin we used for a tub. But for a few hours, I was still wrapped up in the golden dream I’d spun for myself.

Looking back at it, I feel real remorse. I mean, I feel sympathy for that kid who thought he had to lie to get affection and attention and sadness for his clearly traumatized response to the world. But I also think, those men I chatted with. They thought they were talking to one person when they were just talking to me. They thought they were loved. I was taking something from them. I took something from them. The fact of my being lonely doesn’t change the fact that I was perpetrating a scam against other people. Like, fuck. I mean. First of all, where were the grownups. I mean, I started doing this very young. And, I mean. Someone come collect your son, please. But also, being young doesn’t alter the reality that I made people think things that were not true and extracted from them things that I was not entitled to. That’s fucked up.

I recognize in the way I was then certain things about the way people move through the world today. I have been in the New York demimonde for a few months now, and the degree to which people are just out here scamming is amazing. Sometimes I find myself talking to a person at a gallery or at a dinner, and I can see, skimming beneath the surface of what they’re saying, the same calculation of how can I get this person to like me and also find out what they have to offer. You meet a person who talks fast and loud and postures and gesticulates and who names a bunch of their famous friends, and you think, here is a person who absolutely grew up in a trailer park somewhere and who is actively scamming. I recognize it, but I let it ride. People have a right to their scams. They can do what they want. I’ve hung up my scamming mantle. I no longer find it necessary to lie to people about my life.

But, then, I can afford things now.

I suppose that’s the thing about Inventing Anna I disliked the most. Watching it, I felt like I was being scammed. By the production values and by the heavy-handed writing. Scammed little over little into thinking that this show had something to say about the nature of the grift and the nature of artifice. I suppose it felt like a shell game. Because there was nothing in this show that captured the heady, thrilling feeling of getting away with something or the glazed pleasure of believing your own hype. Instead, it was too cynical and too romantic at the same time, and therefore, simply muddled. Dull.

At least a show like The Tinder Swindler captures the self-awareness of willingly believing in a grift someone is perpetrating against you because you are lonely and want love. That documentary tells the story of a group of women who met a guy on Tinder who was pretending to be the scion of billion dollar diamond family. He would fly them out in private jets and then say he loved them and then would ask for $400K because he wa son the run from “enemies.” In reality, the women would give him the money and he’d use it on other women, building to an ever larger score. What I found remarkable about the documentary is how forthright the women are about being scammed. Being deceived. Being led on. They also talk of how they wanted to believe him. How it felt being caught in the beam of his attention. There were moments when I thought, oh, she still loves him despite knowing all she knows. That is what makes a scam like this so compelling. Not what was taken or extracted, but people’s depth of belief.

Inventing Anna fails to capture the depth of belief. It just lingers on the surface, the prurient details of it all. The hotels, the houses, etc. The closest the show gets to the willing belief in false gods is Neff’s continued loyalty despite all the evidence to the contrary. If only the show had followed that thread into the lives of Anna’s other victims, we might have come to some real understanding about our life under the pantheon of the influencer and the algorithm. We might have come to understand these new codes of faith that ordain and organize our lives. These new false idols we worship and follow and like and share and retweet. But instead, it’s just, I don’t know, fine.

Still, watching that show got me thinking about my scamming days. And when I told a friend about it, she asked, Are you even Brandon Taylor? I laughed and said Who can say?

Am I?

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