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About The Book

At age seventeen, Gia Carangi was working the counter at her father's Philadelphia luncheonette, Hoagie City. Within a year, Gia was one of the top models of the late 1970's, gracing the covers of Cosmopolitan and Vogue, partying at New York's Studio 54 and the Mudd Club, and redefining the industry's standard of beauty. She was the darling of moguls and movie stars, royalty and rockers. Gia was also a girl in pain, desperate for her mother's approval—and a drug addict on a tragic slide toward oblivion, who started going directly from $10,000-a-day fashion shoots to the heroin shooting galleries on New York's Lower East Side. Finally blackballed from modeling, Gia entered a vastly different world on the streets of New york and Atlantic City, and later in a rehab clinic. At twenty-six, she became on of the first women in America to die of AIDS, a hospital welfare case visited only by rehab friends and what remained of her family.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with Gia's gamily, lovers, friends, and colleagues, Thing of Beauty creates a poignant portrait of an unforgettable character—and a powerful narrative about beauty and sexuality, fame and objectification, mothers and daughters, love and death.

About The Author

Photograph © Jim Graham

Stephen Fried is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author who teaches at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of RushAppetite for AmericaThing of BeautyBitter Pills, and The New Rabbi, and coauthor of A Common Struggle and Profiles in Mental Health Courage. A two-time winner of the National Magazine Award, Fried has written frequently for Vanity Fair, GQGlamour, and Philadelphia. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, author Diane Ayres. Find out more at StephenFried.com.  

Product Details

  • Publisher: Pocket Books (December 6, 2011)
  • Length: 432 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781451676402

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Raves and Reviews

Boston Globe 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.

Liz Smith Gia's story has everying—glamor, glitz, squalor and tradgedy.

The New York Times Book Review 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?

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