Thing of Beauty - by Stephen Fried (Paperback)

About the Book

Award-winning investigative journalist Stephen Fried offers a remarkable tour of the fashion world in the '70s and '80s as he explores the tragic life and death of beautiful model Gia Carange--who plunged from fame and fortune to an underworld of drug abuse and violence.

Book Synopsis

The inspiration behind the Emmy Award-winning HBO film Gia with Angelina Jolie, this "vivid...exhaustive" (The New York Times Book Review) account of the iconic and tragic life, career, and legacy of supermodel Gia Carangi features a new afterword by the author.

At seventeen, Gia Carangi was working the counter at her father's Philadelphia luncheonette. Within a year, she was one of the world's top models, gracing the covers of Cosmopolitan and Vogue, partying at Studio 54, and redefining the fashion industry's standard of beauty.

But behind the glitz and fame, Gia was a young woman in pain, desperate for her mother's approval and facing a drug addiction that quickly spun out of control. With dizzying speed, she went from $10,000-a-day fashion shoots to using drugs on the streets of New York and Atlantic City before finally being blackballed from modeling. At twenty-six, Gia once again made history as one of the first famous women to die of AIDS.

This "chilling tale" (The Boston Globe), based on hundreds of interviews with friends, family, lovers, and fashionistas (the term author Stephen Fried coined for her industry colleagues), is comprehensively explored in this unputdownable biography that will introduce Gia to a new generation. It is also a powerful exploration of our society's views of beauty and sexuality, fame and objectification, mothers and daughters, love and death.

Review Quotes

Gia's story has everything--glamor, glitz, squalor and tragedy.---- Liz Smith, New York Post Columnist & Cosmopolitan Entertainment Editor

Stephen Fried has done an admirable job reconstructing Gia's frenzied life...Fried makes a convincing case, through recording Gia's travails, that fetching eyes and a killer body are not enough. This is a chilling tale that every pretty, stupid young thing should read.---- Boston Globe

Vivid...The story of Gia Carangi...should be set out among the fashion magazines in modeling agency waiting rooms and any other place where teen-age girls who've been called pretty a little too often hang out...Stephen Fried's exhaustive account of Gia's brief life seems to have an important unanswered quesition on every page: why didn't anyone help Gia?---- The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Stephen Fried is an award-winning investigative journalist. His work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, GQ, and the Washington Post Magazine. A winner of a 1993 National Magazine Award, the Distinguished Service Award for Magazine Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Clarion Award from Women in Communications, he lives in Philadelphia with his wife Diane Ayres, a fiction writer