December 11, 2017

Tina Brown

Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning writer and editor TINA BROWN—former editor-in-chief of TatlerVanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The Daily Beast—for a discussion of The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983–1992. She will be joined in conversation by MEREDITH GOLDSTEIN, columnist and reporter for The Boston Globe.

Details

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 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, 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.

About Author(s)

Tina Brown is an award-winning writer and editor and the founder of the Women in the World summit. Between 1979 and 2001, she was editor in chief of TatlerVanity Fair, and The New Yorker and she authored the 2007 bestselling biography of the Princess of Wales, The Diana Chronicles. In 2008 Brown launched The Daily Beast, and in 2010 launched Tina Brown Live Media to expand Women in the World internationally. She is married to editor, publisher, and historian Sir Harold Evans and lives in New York City.

Meredith Goldstein is an advice columnist and entertainment reporter for The Boston Globe. In 2009, she began writing Love Letters, which inspired her memoir/essay collection, Can't Help Myself: Lessons & Confessions from a Modern Advice Columnist. Meredith was raised in Maryland, and lives in Boston with a David Bowie doll and a full-size cotton candy machine.