Saturday Spotlight: Stephen Fried

Join us for another installment of our Saturday Spotlight Series at the Center City Barnes and Noble! This is an event series focused on celebrating Philadelphia's amazing community of local authors with signings and meet-and-greets each Saturday at the Center City Barnes and Noble. Stop by the store, chat with the authors, and pick up a signed edition of their book!

We've cast our 1pm January 11th Saturday Spotlight on Stephen Fried, author of Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia! 

About Stephen Fried: 

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 Rush, Appetite for America, Thing of Beauty, Bitter 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, GQ, Glamour, and Philadelphia. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, author Diane Ayres. Find out more at StephenFried.com.

About Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of the Supermodel Gia

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.