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Thing of Beauty

The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia

About The Book

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.

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: Gallery Books (October 8, 2024)
  • Length: 432 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781668050798

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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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