Customer Reviews

Thing of Beauty

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After I saw the HBO movie "Gia" I found myself yearning to know more about this woman's life. "Thing of Beauty" not only presents the real and compelling story of Gia from her troubled upper middle class adolescence in suburban Phillie to her rise as the "first supermodel" to her downfall to heroin, which led to her untimely death from AIDS, but is also a great historical/pop culture account of the late '70s and early '80s. Instead of giving a one dimensional look at Gia and getting caught up in the whole sapphic side of her personality like the movie, the book presents a full view of a complex and very tragic woman literally eaten alive by the world of fashion. Had I not picked up this book I never would have known that Cindy Crawford, refered to in the early stages of her career as "Baby Gia," literally owes her success to Gia. (The pictures show an uncanny resemblance.) This book was over 400 pages of tiny text and I devoured it in two days.

This book is more than a biography. I bought the book to better understand Gia's life after seeing her movie. I expected to read about her life. Unfortunately, the author Stephen Fried was too devoted to the minute details of the fashion industry to stay focused on his subject. This is an insider's view of the fashion industry from the 1970s-1980s; Gia was merely an example of this life. It's obvious Fried spent hundreds of hours researching his book. Unfortunately, he didn't spend the necessary time editing the superfluous information out of his book. In a 25 page chapter, he seemed to mention Gia as an afterthought in the last three pages. Gia didn't come into greater focus until the 13th chapter of the book. (The book only has 18 chapters!) When Fried did examine Gia's life, I was impressed with the vivid insights he provided. Yet if he had cut out 100 hundred pages from the 403 page book, it would have been a tighter and more enjoyable story.

I can remember when I was in elementary school and I saw Gia on the cover of Cosmopolitan and I thought to myself, " I wish I could grow up to look like her." I was completely stunned when I found out years later that Gia, the model I had wanted so desperately to look like, had died in horrifically.

I bought the book because of that memory, to see if I couldn't learn something about the woman beyond the image on the glossy cover of the magazine and I found myself mourning for a girl who was lost and had no chance of finding her way out the darkness she was mired in.

The book introduces you to Gia's mother, father, her siblings,and the people she loved most in her life. It was amazing to me that someone so gifted at birth with beauty saw nothing beautiful in herself and spent her life trying to escape the world she created around herself. I got a sense that her mother never realized the damage she did to her daughter by abandoning her children to her ex-husband and she would never accept the responsibility for the pain she inflicted on her daughter. She manipulated her daughter whenever she could. She wanted to live through Gia and in doing so she sucked the joy from her daughter's life.

Having lived the life of an manipulated, stifled child, I could clearly see where the darkness began to seal around Gia. I think that she would have been able to traverse the pitfalls alot better if she had had a friend or two who had wanted only her best interests to be served and not grab a piece of Gia for themselves.

She was a fractured young woman in need of stability and it was only offered to her in segments and at a very high cost. The people around her only brokered the bits and pieces they knew about her. Unfortunately, the one left with the tab was Gia, who died young, in anonymity and without any of her dazzling beauty left. What she found in the end was the fragments of a dream that she truly wanted to pursue, but her chance to grasp the shooting star was lost.

You can never judge a book by its cover and never a person by their physical beauty or lack of it. What makes a person unique is their spirit and the trials and triumphs that they have endured in their lives. Gia didn't have a chance from the start. It didn't matter how beautiful she was, there was no fairy tale ending for her, despite the brilliance of her arrival and short stay in the glittering world of the wealthy and trendy.

This book is great for those who forget that money and beauty can't buy happiness. Gia's couldn't. This book should be a warning and a legacy. A disturbing read but clearly worthwhile.

Hats off to author Stephen Fried, who has undertaken what may be the most exhaustive investigative reporting effort to produce a biography that essentially covered a little more than a decade. The story of the late supermodel Gia Carangi is known by many, but only on the surface. "Thing of Beauty" captures the essence of how a beautiful, but wayward persona can self-destruct when mixed with the capricious intensity of the fashion modeling industry. Sad as Gia's story may be, this book is a great read, and covers not just the storyline of modeling phenomenon, but also of a segment of modeling evolution from the 70's to the 80's.

Given the wide range of choices in characterizing Gia's personality, Mr. Fried could easily have written her off as a hopeless, nut-case, junkie who just happened to be beautiful ... or as an impertinent teenager who never grew up ... or even as an overnight sensation who couldn't handle fame. He didn't. Instead of clinging to demeaning stereotypes, the author brings the reader closer to Gia through countless hours of interviews with friends, family, fellow artists and noteworthy modeling industry personnel. Along with the excellent documentation of Gia's life, how the modeling business took shape during the time when her life was unfolding adds a fantastic complement to this tragic story. For each marker that Mr. Fried plants during Gia's story, I couldn't help but think back to what I was doing at exactly those times from the mid-70's to Gia's death in 1986.

Some say Gia would have self-destructed no matter what; others say that a BS job in a superficial industry wore her down. Far be it for me to judge, but you don't have to be a fashion/model fanatic to enjoy this book. It's simply a fascinating, moving biography.

This isn't the story of Gia's life whereas she never had much of a life...she was used as a doll to vicariously live through by her mother, she used others to fulfill the love she so desperately craved-and couldn't give herself-and was used by an industry that cared less if it's workers lived/died/whatever, as evidenced by the (non)reactions to her death.

Gia deserved better than this, we all do, it's a pity that people (mentioned in the book, not the readers) are more interested in knowing the real person posthumously than they were when she was alive, breathing, and searching for love, a place to belong, and a way to achieve inner beauty.

If anything, this is more a cautionary tale about dysfunctional family life and it's effect on young, growing children rather than a warning about the fashion industry, more of us probably fall into the former category rather than under the label "supermodel."

At 19 Gia was a top model in the highly competitive world of beauty marketing, earning $100,000 in 1980, and was in constant demand. Industry experts expected her to hit the pinnacle of the business by age 21and earn the highest salary available to only a few models in the world - $500,000 per year. Other models envied her; her family and friends rejoiced for her good fortune.

However, the surface beauty hid an emotionally distraught young woman. Raised in a clearly dysfunctional family, Gia had begun regularly burying her intense emotional pain with regular drug use and all night partying at wild clubs while in her teens. Her craving for artificial escape from life continued during her modeling career, where drugs and all night clubbing were routine and well tolerated within the industry.

Her search for the solution to her emotional insecurities and enormous need for love was filled by heavy heroin use before she turned 21, but the industry became her enabler, hid! ing the track marks on her arms and hand with poses and airbrushing. Only when she stopped showing up to photo shootings was her drug addiction viewed as a problem, but she was still offered sporadic work.

As Gia's consumption of heroin grew to massive amounts, she finally lost her career, money, and dignity, descending into the netherworld of sleazy heroin clubs, borrowing and stealing money from friends and family, and destroying her professional and personal relationships.

She died at age 26 from AIDS - one of the first American women to be diagnosed and die from the plague that decimated the beauty marketing industry.

Whether one feels sorry for her or that she brought all her problems on herself, one cannot read this book without feeling touched by her life and struggles. The sheer tragedy of her wasted life and her intense emotional fragility leaves one feeling "Why couldn't something have been done to save her?'

Gia is dead, but not forgott! en.

Stephen Fried wonderfuly captures the life and times of the girl who was responsible for the word Supermodel. Fried takes us on a fantastic journey which was Gia's life. His brand of tell it like it is journalism is refreshing. His portrayal of Gia's Joan Crawfordish mother Kathleen is extremely eye-opening. This is not the same Kathleen which was featured in the movie GIA. Instead we see Kathleen as she is self-centered, unloving, and cold-blooded. What kind of mother would not let her child come home to die? By the time I finished this book, I realized that GIA was a product of an unloving mother who greatly contributed to her tragic fate....

My mother grew up in South New Jersey and knew Gia. She went to Philadelphia alot as a teen and young adult, and frequented the Hoagie shop where Gia occasioanlly worked and that her father owned. They were not the "best" of friends. But this book certainly let her in on what she did not know about Gia, and what she couldn't tell me. She read it first, then I did. Some of the items in the book she was aware of, such as the personality of Gia and the luck of Gia hitting the fashion world. What it did not say was that those who casually knew "of" Gia, like my mom and her friends, were very excited and proud of her at that time for she did something many dreamed about. Consequently, as the 80's went on and eveyone moved on, Gia's pictures were everywhere then all of a sudden...nothing. This book tells why. My mom didn't find out about Gia's death until well after, and it was shocking. We watched the HBO film as well and although that too left out much, it did serve in telling how fast you can get something and how fast it can go away as well. Maybe people wanted more insight into Gia, and less about the fashion industry and her homosexuality but all these parts made Gia a whole, and this book is just another part, another view...a darned good one. My mother's experiences with Gia was totally different, and of course she has another view of her and her family. But that is what Journalism is all about, someone laying out the facts for you to draw your own conclusions. I feel that with all I know and with this book, it is one of the best eforts to give insight of Gia all around. The other way to know, we all never will because Gia was different things to different people. She was hard to peg. All this book does is give you insight to those around her, around her career and circumstances leading to her disease and death. A must read I think for every teenage girl who thinks modeling is just stardom, money, magazine covers, tv/film breaks and a chance to get Rock Star boyfriends (or girlfriends.)

Thanks to Fried for a well-written, and long overdue, book about model Gia Carangi - a sad, sweet, unique, and very original, woman. This story will touch anyone who has a heart...while many may ask why someone with such a beautiful soul and who seemed to have it all, would do the things she did that brought her eventual death, after reading this book, they may get a better idea of why Gia basically destroyed herself - even though I don't believe that was her aim. Not only is this a story of a sad life that ended way too soon and shouldn't have happened that way, along with some idea of life as a model, but it also is a story of how NOT to be a mother. Unfortunately, many of Gia's friends and the rest of her family were not much better. Read this book and judge for yourself; but remember the good things about Gia, and watch out for those you love better than Gia was cared for.

This is a very good book and a very good read. The portrait Fried paints of Gia is extremely sympathetic and he does an effective job of getting us to care about her story. It is a truly tragic one which indicts some in the fashion industry for their indifference toward Gia's suffering and their exploitation of her drug abuse. It seems to suggests that Gia's extraordinary beauty was a curse because in her case it completely obscured her personality and threw her in circumstances that encouraged her personal destruction. You will grow to have genuine affection for this troubled young woman whose brief life could perhaps have been saved if the right people had determined to save it. Very engrossing.