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

The author gets a backstage pass to the personal life of the world’s most famous woman – but what do we really learn?

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.