Citizen Kim by Jonathan Van Meter review – Kardashian under the microscope

The magazine writer Jonathan Van Meter profiles very famous people for extremely glossy publications. He was responsible for the notorious 1990 interview in which supermodel Linda Evangelista said she wouldn’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day, and in recent years, he has interviewed Taylor Swift, Michelle Obama and Lady Gaga for American Vogue. In 2019, he wrote a cover story, also for Vogue, on Kim Kardashian, the reality TV star turned business­woman turned criminal justice activist, and one of the most famous women in the world. In the lengthy acknowledgments to this book, he describes receiving a phonecall from her after the piece had been published. “There’s no better feeling in the world than when someone gets you,” she told him. He replied by telling her that he was going to write a book about her, “whether you like it or not!”

Spoiler alert: she liked it. And the concept underlying the book can be justified: Kim Kardashian really has transformed celebrity culture. Her family, broadcasting their lives for years, came to define contemporary reality television, beginning with Keeping Up With the Kardashians in 2007 and continuing to the present day with The Kardashians. She saw the potential in social media and used it to her advantage from its inception. Last year, her clothing line, Skims, was valued at $5bn (£3.75bn). Van Meter notes that despite her ubiquitous presence, there has been “a dearth of well-written profiles and shrewd cultural analysis” about the phenomenon of Kim K.

But what is promised and what is delivered are not exactly the same. Early on, Van Meter references Kant and the academic Timothy Morton, and later, he invokes Joan Didion’s writing on Hollywood. But any attempts at cultural analysis, shrewd or otherwise, quickly fall away in favour of a more traditional in-depth biography, its wheels greased by regular, intimate access to the Kardashians and many of Kim’s closest friends and colleagues.

Van Meter visits his subject often, at her many homes and places of work. They talk over snacks and coffee. Kim may be in her pyjamas or a bathrobe, having just got out of the shower. At one point, she does away with the formality of clothing entirely. “I looked up from my phone and she was entirely naked. Neither of us flinched,” he writes, describing a day spent with her at a photoshoot. This is intended to suggest candour, though inevitably it implies a lack of critical distance. At the end, in the acknowledgements, he thanks her for her “time, but more so, your trust”.

Van Meter notes that Kim does not like to dwell on the bad stuff, nor does she seem particularly inclined towards introspection. What more is there to say about her life that has not already been televised? Ironically, her views on the family’s show may be the most fascinating part of this book. Doing television has been good for them, she says, “because we’re not going to leave an episode unfinished” – by which she means that arguments are almost always resolved, because they have to be, for the shape of the TV narrative. Public and private are one and the same.

At its best, the book does expose some of the Kardashian family’s gothic underbelly. In 1995, Kim’s mother and father found themselves on opposing sides of the OJ Simpson murder trial (Kris Jenner supported her best friend Nicole Brown’s family during the trial, while her ex-husband, the late Robert Kardashian, was on Simpson’s legal team). For a while, Kim’s teenage boyfriend was TJ Jackson, nephew of Michael, whose own family lore is horrifying and unique. Her school days are likened to the movie Clueless, but there is a touch of Bret Easton Ellis in there, too.

There is some reflection on the sex tape that propelled Kim into the public eye (it has left her with “a lot to prove”, she says). Van Meter offers a pop-psychology analysis of why she seems to gravitate towards “lost boys”, and she talks about her marriage to Kanye West, albeit with respect and restraint. She describes a move away from a more materialistic worldview after being robbed at gunpoint in Paris, in 2016. The book ends with speculation that she might run for political office. “I am so flattered,” she responds, and leaves the prospect open.

There are moments of camp extravagance. One chapter begins, “Did the trouble start with not one, but two boob jobs?” Van Meter namedrops Anna Wintour, Oprah Winfrey and his own tennis coach. But elsewhere, the narrative swoons and fawns. Kim’s private jet is “a shade of nudey grey,” we learn. “Which is so me,” she says. It is also so this book. The Kardashian aura must be strong, because reading this evokes the same sensation as watching their show: it is seductive, hypnotic, but possessed of a sleight of hand that turns everything beige.