The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983–1992
- Author Tina Brown
- Narrator Tina Brown
- Publisher Orion
- Publish Date 14 November 2017
- Run Time 16 hours and 41 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Autobiography: arts and entertainment, Autobiography: writers, Diaries, letters and journals, Memoirs, News media and journalism.
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What to expect
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.
'A fabulous odyssey ... I read it in a mad frenzy' Stephen Fry
'Full of creative glee, passion and wild-ride excitement' Simon Schama
'Hang on - it's a wild ride' Meryl Streep
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 Condé 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, comedy and 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.
(p) Macmillan US 2017 Written and Read by Tina Brown
'A fabulous odyssey ... I read it in a mad frenzy' Stephen Fry
'Full of creative glee, passion and wild-ride excitement' Simon Schama
'Hang on - it's a wild ride' Meryl Streep
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 Condé 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, comedy and 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.
(p) Macmillan US 2017 Written and Read by Tina Brown
Critics Review
A mile-a-minute memoir I read like a parrot with my nails embedded in Pirate Tina's shoulder, yelling 'What??!!' 'What!?!!' 'WOWZA!' as she swashbuckles through the eighties, her sword slicing up the staid shibboleths of New York. I remembered why I was afraid of her in those days. And why that energy and imagination, turned to making the world better, has galvanized so many of us now. A cultural catalyst, she makes things happen. Thank god she wrote it all down. Hang on - it's a wild ride
As delightful as eating a whole box of chocolates, without a trace of weight gain . . . irresistible
Brilliant, concretely realised social history as much as a fabulous odyssey, and I read it in a mad frenzy
I read them in one six-hour sprint of pure pleasure and joy . . . indiscreet, brilliantly observed, frequently hilarious. It's all here: the Demi Moore naked and pregnant front cover, Claus von Bulow photographed in black leather, Donald and Ivana Trump, the whole sweep of Eighties Manhattan reported at first hand in Tina's fresh, beady, borderline-paranoid style
Heaven
Full of creative glee, passion and wild-ride excitement, The Vanity Fair Diaries features a cast of characters like Mad Men (and women) on speed; an epic of a legendary magazine's dazzling re-creation; moments of laugh-out-loud comic asides, juicy gossip and sketches of Austen-like sharpness, all put together by an editor of high-octane genius who pauses only to reflect that however good she might be, it's never quite good enough. Oh yes it is. Read the diaries and feel better about everything
Addictive . . . features encounters with every influential name under the sun (political, literary and Hollywood stars) as well as an insight into Brown's publishing power, which changed magazine journalism for ever
A great deal of fun . . . a perfect primer to the gaudy excesses of 1980s culture. It is her joy in her job, her delight at being ringside in this moment, and, most of all, her sheet chutzpah, which keeps you turning the pages
Brown is brilliant at these gleeful little character descriptions . . . She has the knack of making people instantly interesting . . . a fast-paced and head-spinningly hectic read
The party-by-party, cover-by-cover story of how a Brit conquered New York publishing
Brown [is] a fabulous diarist. It's not just that she's a wonderful writer (although she is: fluent, funny, fierce). It's more that, even after taking her seat at America's top table, she never stops noticing. Amid the narcotic stupefaction of great wealth, Brown is invariably alert and on the money
Such a juicy read. She's honest about every interaction, no matter how big the star: every success and every mistake
One is left with huge admiration for Brown's wit, talent and determination
The juiciest [book] of the year
[A] terrifying, breakneck, hothouse, backstage tour of how magazines, news and views, and reputations are made and destroyed. [It] made me crave an anti-anxiety pill!
Within a couple of years she had turned it into the house magazine of a resurgent celebrity beau monde and gained an untouchable star quality of her own. Her diaries recount this will to power with caustic drollery and dash
A great portrait of the greed, the glitter, the fatal superficiality of that decade . . . her witty skewerings are first-class
High, low, smart, sexy, Tina Brown's The Vanity Fair Diaries is like the magazine she reinvented, a must-read for anyone interested in Hollywood, high society, and the movers and shakers of pop culture
A brilliant portrait of New York in an age of shoulder-padded excess by a British editor who can pass as American, but never lost her merciless gift for a great story
[A] fascinating memoir from a publishing legend
Gripping, funny . . . [Brown's] enthusiasm for New York, and magazines, is infectious
Addictive
The Vanity Fair Diaries has a Gone with the Wind-like feel: it's a chronicle of a lost age, before the internet, when 'to be the editor of Time or Newsweek was to be a demigod'. Yeah, and to be Tina Brown was very heaven
A journalism masterclass
Fun and often funny
Tina Brown, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair during the 1980s, covers her time in Manhattan with wit and wisdom, as she unwraps the stories behind the famous covers and tells of how she fought her corner, raised a family and strove to make the magazine a success
Enthralling - and terrifying
The perfect stocking filler for any social x-ray who yearns to wallow in nostalgia. But even students of our own time with find the prescience of Brown's observations a source of amusement.
She makes you glad that someone was taking notes
Anyone who was anyone in Eighties New York can be found in Brown's polished account of her time editing US magazine Vanity Fair. The result is a page-turning hymn to a vanished media age
Her pen portraits of the denizens of the Manhattan zoo are invariably sharp, and sometimes caustic . . . compulsive reading
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