The Vanity Fair Diaries: Power, Wealth, Celebrity, and Dreams: My Years at the Magazine That Defined a Decade

By Tina Brown

Book Overview

Named one of the best books of 2017 by Time, People, The Guardian, Paste Magazine, and Vogue

"A zingy account of the glittery, shallow 1980s . . . Brown is a waspish, reliably slick writer--her witty skewerings are first-class." --The Times (London)

Tina Brown kept delicious daily diaries throughout her eight spectacular years as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. Today they provide an incendiary portrait of the flash and dash and power brokering of the Excessive Eighties in New York and Hollywood.

The Vanity Fair Diaries is the story of an Englishwoman barely out of her twenties who arrives in New York City with a dream. Summoned from London in hopes that she can save Cond Nast's troubled new flagship Vanity Fair, Tina Brown is immediately plunged into the maelstrom of the competitive New York media world and the backstabbing rivalries at the court of the planet's slickest, most glamour-focused magazine company. She survives the politics, the intrigue, and the attempts to derail her by a simple stratagem: succeeding. In the face of rampant skepticism, she triumphantly reinvents a failing magazine.

Here are the inside stories of Vanity Fair scoops and covers that sold millions--the Reagan kiss, the meltdown of Princess Diana's marriage to Prince Charles, the sensational Annie Leibovitz cover of a gloriously pregnant, naked Demi Moore. In the diary's cinematic pages, the drama, the comedy, and the struggle of running an "it" magazine come to life. Brown's Vanity Fair Diaries is also a woman's journey, of making a home in a new country and of the deep bonds with her husband, their prematurely born son, and their daughter.

Astute, open-hearted, often riotously funny, Tina Brown's The Vanity Fair Diaries is a compulsively fascinating and intimate chronicle of a woman's life in a glittering era.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1250191254
• ISBN13: 9781250191250
• Release Date: October 2018
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A Time Capsule of Celebrity

Tina Brown is an amazing writer, her sentences are elegant and uniquely picturesque. This book is a lot of inside bingo on New York celebrity culture in the era of Reagan, so if you want to relive that, these diary entries are for you. If that sort of things gets on your nerves after a while — the name dropping and bizarre lifestyles of the beautiful people — you’ll play this out in the early sections as I did. The author is a brilliant talent, and Vanity Fair had its day, but some time capsules are meant to stay closed to all but those who revel in their opening. I’m not sure magazines ever mattered as much as she would have us believe, but in today’s world it is curious to remember they once mattered at all.