num_pages: 422
description: At age seventeen Gia Carangi was working the counter at her father's Philadelphia luncheonette in 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 while 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. A drug addict on a tragic slide toward oblivion who started going directly from $10000-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 one 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.
language: English
title: Thing of Beauty
publisher: Pocket Books