Jonathan Van Meter is one of the best magazine profilers working — the man got Linda Evangelista to say the quiet part loud in 1990 and has since extracted memorable moments from Taylor Swift, Michelle Obama, and Lady Gaga. So when he spent years in close proximity to Kim Kardashian and emerged with a full-length book, the reasonable expectation was something with teeth. What we get instead is a long, glossy, well-reported piece stretched to book length, its critical apparatus dissolved by proximity. The central problem is structural, not incidental. Van Meter received what he describes as intimate, regular access — multiple homes, pyjama-clad mornings, photoshoot days where his subject dispensed with clothing entirely. He frames this nakedness as evidence of candour. The reader will notice it is evidence of something else: that when a subject trusts a journalist this completely, the journalist stops being a journalist. The acknowledgments, where he thanks Kim for her 'time, but more so, your trust,' confirm the dynamic. This is authorised biography in all but name. The promise made early — Kant, Timothy Morton, Joan Didion's Hollywood — evaporates almost immediately. What replaces it is the kind of material that good celebrity biography delivers: family gothic, social context, business timeline. And to be fair, some of it is genuinely interesting. The OJ Simpson trial splitting Kim's parents — Kris Jenner supporting Nicole Brown's family while Robert Kardashian defended Simpson — is the kind of biographical detail that reframes everything downstream. The teenage relationship with TJ Jackson, nephew of Michael, is another data point in a family story that is stranger and darker than the televised version suggests. Kim's own reflections are occasionally the most revealing content in the book. Her observation that reality television forced resolution of family arguments — 'we're not going to leave an episode unfinished' — is a genuinely sharp insight about how the medium shapes private life. The Paris robbery as a turning point away from materialism, the sex tape as permanent professional debt ('a lot to prove'), and the restrained discussion of Kanye West all get space. Skims, valued at $5 billion in 2024, gets its due as the business case for taking her seriously. Van Meter's point that there has been 'a dearth of well-written profiles and shrewd cultural analysis' about Kim K is accurate — it just doesn't describe the book he wrote. The prose is competent and occasionally camp in pleasurable ways. 'Did the trouble start with not one, but two boob jobs?' is a good opening line. The private jet described as 'a shade of nudey grey' — 'which is so me,' she says — is a perfectly observed moment. Van Meter knows how to write a sentence. But the accumulated effect of the book is what the reviewer rightly calls beige: seductive, hypnotic, and possessed of a sleight of hand that turns even the gothic material soft. The Kardashian aura operates on the author the same way it operates on viewers of the show, and he seems insufficiently bothered by this. The speculation at the book's close — that she might run for political office — is treated with breathless curiosity rather than the structural analysis such a prospect would warrant. 'I am so flattered,' she says, and leaves the prospect open. Van Meter leaves it open too, which is exactly the problem. After three-hundred-odd pages, we know more facts about Kim Kardashian and feel no closer to understanding the mechanism by which one woman became the defining figure of a particular cultural moment. The book that could have done that — genuinely reckoning with celebrity, image, parasocial intimacy, and the economics of attention — is still waiting to be written.
