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Thing of Beauty | 
 enlarge | Author: Stephen Fried
Publisher: Pocket
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  79 reviews
Sales Rank: 70730
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 4.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0671701053
Dewey Decimal Number: 659.152
EAN: 9780671701055
ASIN: 0671701053
Publication Date: June 1, 1994
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Amazon.com
Trashy celebrity bios are usually diminished by the fact that we've already heard the stories about Lonnie and Burt, or Madonna and Sean, or whoever the current target is. Author Stephen Fried manages to get all the sleaze value plus a lot of surprises by choosing supermodel Gia Carangi as his topic. Although her face is widely recognized, Gia finished her modeling career in a blaze of heroin and disease just before the time when models became celebrities with name recognition. Her life is the perfect fodder for the exploitation market, but Fried goes beyond that with fluid prose and a reporter's nose for tracking down sources. His stories about her teenage years, with their mix of late nights in Philadelphia's gay clubs, manic worship, and glam-style imitation of David Bowie, as well as tales of Gia's ability to seduce her friends, male and female, are the product of a lot of work and make for very interesting reading. Gia's unabashed homosexuality and early death from AIDS make her story a palimpsest of life on the edge in the America of the 1980s.
Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 74 more reviews...
 Excellent Biography July 5, 2008
Stephen Fried delivers a thoroughly researched, well-written and very well-rounded picture of Gia's tragically short life. He manages to present the factors that contributed to her meteoric rise to supermodel status and equally rapid fall from the fashion world's grace fairly and without oversimplification. Along the way, we get a glimpse into the hard realities of an industry that manages to look wonderfully glamorous on the surface but behind the scenes grinds down and then discards all but the toughest. We are given a heart-rending portrait of a young woman who struggled to deal with a multitude of inner demons including early abandonment by her mother and the social unacceptability of her sexual orientation by developing a tough exterior that ultimately could not contain her pain. And we get a genuinely chilling look into the self-deceptive thought processes of denial and rationalization employed by a seriously narcissistic mother who was deeply enmeshed with her daughter but was never really capable of putting Gia's best interests first or of loving her unconditionally. Fascinating stuff and a good read as well.
Heartbreaking April 22, 2008
the only book i have ever, and WILL ever cry over. okay maybe not cry, but i def teared up while reading the last few pages. her life was just so incredibly sad. this book is written beautifully, and was very hard to put down. i defy anyone to not fall in love with Gia during this book, and have heartache when it's over. towards the end is a "where are they now" but it's about 15 yrs old. i wish steven would do an updated version!!
 Too much detail....Gia's story is in there somewhere April 4, 2008
Here is what I liked about this book: This book was well written and loaded with great information. Information, not only about Gia but anything you wanted to know about the modeling industry in the late 70's and early 80's, the culture of that time, New York and the bar scene. The author even had some comments about the politics of the time with some typically left-wing media type comments about Ronald Reagan. Here is what I didn't like: I thought I was reading a book about Gia Carangi and her life. Instead, I got more than I bargained for. If you want an education on the modeling industry during the time, this is the book for you. Me, I was never interested in this industry, even as a teenager. The author's attempt to provide detail of the modeling industry was like reading a textbook or maybe it was an explanation of one more thing to blame on Gia's demise. It might have escalated the downward spiral but the real source behind Gia's addiction was her childhood. There is no doubt in my mind, after reading this book, the the sole source for Gia's addiction was her dysfunctional family. The author's attempt to use the modeling industry, the culture of that time period, Reagan cutting funding for public drug rehab, did not convince me otherwise. Yes, this is a very sad story and I am very glad I read it. I have been surfing the web to see the collection of covers and pictures of this incredibly beautiful person. It definitely left an impression on me. I just think this story could have been told in a more personal, more concise way.
 Gia January 29, 2008
If a woman was in need of Love it was not GIA. She had so many people that she hurt and destroyed because of her drug abuse. She was a little girl that needed t o grow up. However, we will never know who she will become because of AIDs. She was a druggie and a Lesbian prostitute who never got to shine her bright beautiful light.
Tragic life, Worse death December 30, 2007
One of the saddest books I have ever read. Gia seemed to have it all, looks, photographed great,travel, money etc...everything but the love and stability you yearned for.She died destitute, and people from the modeling world still did not know of her death until months afterwards.Friendships are fast and fleeting in the modeling world. The super models who came through unscathed seemed to be those with very close family ties such as Christie Brinkley and Cindy Crawford. They had genuine friendships outside the modeling world. I think her mother was protecting her from the awful world of the tabloids. What a picture the beautiful Gia, dying of aids. It would have been all over the world.A good read for any aspiring model and her family to read.She died because people just didn't care enough, as long as that perfect shot came through.
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