The internet cannot stop talking about Inventing Anna, the Shonda Rhimes-produced Netflix series about Anna Delvey—and that includes the real people behind the show. The drama is based on an article in New York Magazine by journalist Jessica Pressler (fun fact: her article was also the basis for Hustlers starring Jennifer Lopez), and Pressler recently chatted with Vulture about what it's been like to see her reporting unfold on television.
In the show, Anna Chlumsky plays Vivian, a character loosely based on Pressler but definitively not Pressler. But even with the show's from what really happened, Pressler says there's an "emotional truth" to Inventing Anna.
"It’s so much more dramatic because it’s a TV show, but the arc of the feelings that I had reporting the story, the feelings I had about journalism being complicated and whether this is an exploitative job—that is stuff I was thinking about. It definitely comes out in that last episode, which is hard for me to watch. It gets into my guilt and discomfort about having elevated this person: Is Anna making decisions in real life because she is now very famous, and did I do that? I think they did pull that out," Pressler told Vulture.
She knew from the start that the story was going to be somewhat fictionalized. "I think it was always going to be not me," Pressler says of the journalist character on the show. "The show is fictionalized, and the character is a guide to this universe. When I met Anna Chlumsky, she was like, 'I’m not doing you,' and I was like, 'Great!' Vivian is like an all-caps angry email of me, but there are things that are very real mixed into it."
The bosses at the magazine on the show also couldn't be further from her editors in real life, Pressler says. "I think the show bosses are a stand-in for patriarchal offices in general. But this is a thing where fact is braided with fiction. It was not a no-brainer to do an 8,000-word story about a non-famous person. It might be now." She also never had a mystery wall; instead she chronicled her research in a spreadsheet, but that wouldn't have made for as compelling television.
Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma, a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram.
