The Eternal Optimism of Kim Kardashian

The title Citizen Kim, the new biography of Kim Kardashian by Jonathan Van Meter, is a reference to Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Is Van Meter’s subject Charles Foster Kane, the rich mogul who absconds from society, or Susan Alexander, the talentless, beautiful ingénue? Trick question. “You are the mogul and the muse; you are the billionaire and the pretty young thing,” Van Meter told Kardashian when she asked him about the connection between the two. 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.

Kim Kardashian is kind of the modern era’s Forrest Gump

The prologue to Van Meter’s biography is essentially a justification — to himself, his friends, and his tennis instructor — about why someone like Kim Kardashian is worth so much time, energy, and thought. While Van Meter has tremendous respect and interest in Kardashian as a person, defending her against allegations of being a “talentless, empty vessel,” the greatest case for writing about her is that she has been present for a number of the past 30 years’ most essential events and movements: the O.J. Simpson trial, Michael Jackson, TMZ, Paris Hilton, nascent reality TV, the broadening scope of the Met Gala, Instagram, Kanye West, Donald Trump. “She is a shared point of reference on a cultural map,” Van Meter writes, adding that she’s one of the last “vestiges of monoculture.”

It’s because of her presence at so many of these events that she’s been able to maintain her grasp on culture: She developed a hardened shell before many other stars of her age, defending herself and her family members against the intrusive public eye by weaponizing how we saw her. For every story Kardashian tells from an eventful time in her life, she always remembers some aesthetic detail. The day the O.J. verdict came through? “I was wearing jean shorts,” Kardashian remembers. 

She and her family have always believed themselves to be destined for greatness

Citizen Kim reads, at times, like something of a hypercapitalist fairy tale: a woman destined for greatness through the sheer fortitude and business acumen of her ancestors before her. Van Meter dives deep on both the Kardashian and Houghton (Kris Jenner’s maiden name) sides of the family: MJ, Kardashian’s beloved maternal grandmother, was the proprietor of several clothing stores in Southern California; on her Armenian side of the family, Helen, Kardashian’s paternal grandmother, passed down a steely reserve and sense of glamour. Even beyond her genetics, Kardashian was a “thing” before she was a thing. “She has always been KIM KARDASHIAN since she was little,” longtime friend Zoe Winkler explains to Van Meter, detailing the ways in which Kim (and, to some extent, Kourtney) were the queen bees even in elementary school. At Kardashian’s eighth-grade graduation, she leaned into the microphone up on the podium and announced, “When I’m famous, you’re going to remember me as this beautiful little girl!”

It’s hard to keep Kris Jenner out of the spotlight

For a book that’s ostensibly about Kim, the word “Kris” appears nearly 400 times in Van Meter’s text, proving that the era’s first and foremost “momager” can’t stay away, even if she’s not on the cover. 

Finally: a little backstory on “get your fucking ass up and work”

One of Kardashian’s more iconic moments in the past decade was when, during a Variety interview, she said, “I have the best advice for women in business: Get your fucking ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days.” It was, per Van Meter — who was there that day — something of a shock to hear uttered aloud from someone who otherwise avoids saying something “definite.” “She is almost old-fashioned and ladylike; doesn’t wade into controversy, never weighs in on politics, doesn’t gossip,” Van Meter observes. (Those last three, however, are somewhat disproven by years of footage on both Keeping Up With the Kardashians and The Kardashians.) Kardashian was, however, in a “mood” that day and “juggling chainsaws”: backlash from Kanye West’s ongoing behavior circling back to her as she was facing allegations of “blackfishing” in Vogue. “It was the only time I’d seen her look rattled,” Van Meter recalls of that fateful day. “I could not help but wonder if that moment was somehow emblematic of something new.”

She’s finally processing the past few decades of her life

One of the recurring questions Van Meter has for Kardashian surrounds trauma: childhood, marital, from the Paris robbery in 2016. Despite Kardashian’s penchant for good manners and overall refusal to be a “drag,” she’s endured quite a few things that would weigh heavily on the heart and mind of any sane person. Yet she’s the only one of her sisters who maintains she wasn’t traumatized by her parents’ divorce, and it wasn’t until working with a therapist in 2024 did Kardashian even realize the extent of what she’d lived through. Her calm is her “superpower,” her therapist explained, against the rising tides in all directions. “In big traumatic experiences, I feel like what I learned to do over and over was deal with it and move on,” she says. As her life slows down, however, and her kids get older, Kardashian has more power than ever to see what’s next for her. “She may lose her superpower,” Van Meter speculates, and, in turn, gain something even more “human, vulnerable” for the first time.