Kim Kardashian is a self-made mogul, social media genius, fashion icon, and unlikely advocate for criminal justice reform. But she is also dismissed as a figure of scandal, spectacle, and reality television. The truth is more complicated—and revealing. Citizen Kim is a portrait of a woman we think we know. Born into an Armenian American family in Beverly Hills and marked early by proximity to tragedy and notoriety, Kim’s sense of ambition was evident from the start. She rose from Paris Hilton’s sidekick to tabloid fixation, reality-television star, and ultimately, the luminary of a new celebrity economy—an ascent that reveals how precisely she understood the culture she would come to create in her image.
A nuanced, intimate and imperfect biography ... He’s clearly the right man for the job when it comes to making Kardashian more palatable to dorks and snobs like me ... No authorized biography can be 'completely real.' But Citizen Kim definitely left me with a more authentic — or at least more human — impression of Kim and her family ... While Van Meter is good at explaining why the Kardashians live the way they do, he’s not so great at pondering whether they should.
Citizen Kim doesn’t just make the case for Kardashian’s continued relevance — though it does — but it also showcases the star and socialite and entrepreneur and actor as something of an anomaly, a series of contradictions that say more about us and the times in which we live than her. Though it still has plenty to say about her ... Reads, at times, like something of a hypercapitalist fairy tale.
Van Meter’s witty prose is a pleasure to read—in fact, as easy on the eyes as a SKIMS ad—but that’s also part of the problem. The rosiness spreads far beyond tone ... Of course, an authorized biography is entitled to its sympathies. More curious is where the book seems to want to sit in the larger conversation. In the prologue of Citizen Kim, Van Meter laments the 'dearth of well-written profiles and shrewd cultural analysis' about the Kar-Jenner family ... This, of course, overlooks the work of a number of critics and scholars ... Kardashian may possess no obvious historical analogue, but this book contains two consistent characters: the subject and the writer. The latter elaborates on his experiences at his subject’s various homes, offices, and photo shoots, allowing a desiring reader the thrill of access.
