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 must-listen 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.
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Stephen Fried is an award-winning magazine journalist, a bestselling author, and an adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of two books on healthcare, mental health, and addiction—Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs and Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia—as well as The New Rabbi, Husbandry, and his recent historical biography Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West—One Meal at a Time, which was a New York Times bestseller. Fried lives in Philadelphia with his wife, author Diane Ayres.
Jonathan Todd Ross is a writer and an Earphones and Audie Award–winning voice actor. He has lent his voice to numerous anime television shows, including Yu-Gi-Oh! and Sonic X.