On Origin, Responsibility, and Flow
Learning from the life of fake Germain heiress, Anna Delvey
“We think we shape [our children] and we create who they become. Because we do for them, and we love them and we guide them. But no. We do not make them. Children do not come from, they come through.”
—Anna (Delvey) Sorokina’s mom, Inventing Anna
I already know this will be one of those posts where I share my half-thoughts and slow considerations. I would much prefer to write only things that are complete but that’s not always as interesting. So here we go.
Maybe you remember the headlines back in 2018 about Anna Delvey, a woman who posed as a wealthy German heiress in New York City, fooling everyone from socialite friends to prominent banks and fancy hotels. After she was caught, journalist Jessica Pressler wrote an article1 about her that became a nine-part limited series on Netflix called Inventing Anna.2
I recently finished watching the show and can’t stop thinking about this young woman whose life exhibited a long list of questionable (diagnosable?) behaviors: grandiosity, gaslighting, entitlement, emotional detachment, and manipulative charm (to name only a few). In the show, when the journalist travels to Anna’s hometown and speaks with her parents, the character who played Anna’s mom said that line I quoted above—children don’t come from, they come through.
I don’t know if Anna Delveys’ real life mother ever said this, but the fictional version seemed to find an imperfect peace in those words, comforting herself with the knowledge that she did the best she could but in the end, Anna was her own person who was going to make her own decisions (and her own mistakes).