Kim Kardashian Read Every Page of Her Authorized Biography. Here’s What She Pushed Back On.

Jonathan Van Meter, the legendary magazine writer and editor, has spent much of his career getting unusually close to famous women. His intimate profiles on cultural powerhouses like Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Aniston, Jodie Foster, Liza Minnelli and Lady Gaga, to name a few, have appeared in the pages of Esquire, Vanity Fair, New York and Vogue, among scores of other glossies. I have known Jonathan for more than 30 years, since we were both came of age in New York magazine publishing during its last golden age, the early 1990s. He is a gifted reporter, a superb raconteur and, as anyone who knows him will attest, a man with very strong feelings about practically everything. So when he told me during the pandemic that he intended to devote the next several years to writing a biography of Kim Kardashian, I was intrigued — and skeptical. Kardashian might be the most extensively documented woman of her generation. Between reality television, social media and a bottomless tabloid appetite, what could possibly remain to discover? And how would a writer who specializes in emotional complexity get beneath the exquisitely managed surface of someone who has built a billion-dollar-scale public identity around revealing herself while simultaneously giving almost nothing away? The result is Citizen Kim, an authorized biography that took five years to report and write. Van Meter spent time in Kardashian’s homes, accompanied her to photo shoots, watched her conduct business and interviewed dozens of people from across her life. He also discovered that access has its own complications. Kardashian read the manuscript, objected to some passages and, according to Van Meter, ultimately accepted almost all of them. He, meanwhile, found himself increasingly protective of his subject — a predicament he discussed with his therapist. I am aware that one old friend interviewing another about the hazards of getting too close to your subject carries its own set of ironies. We talked anyway, about the handshake deal that got him in the door, Kim’s infamous sex tape, the people he didn’t get to talk to him (Kanye West, Ray J and Paris Hilton, who canceled 17 times) and whether a biographer can fall in love with his subject and still find a way to tell the truth about her. You’re in the thick of your press tour right now. How’s it going? I did three interviews this morning: Dutch, German, German. For some reason, the fucking Germans love this book. But there’s no book tour, no in-person events, no book party. It’s all Zoom and podcasts. I put on some lip balm, throw on a nice shirt and sit down in my office. What’s interesting is seeing what people take. The Daily Mail paid the U.K. publisher a lot of money for an excerpt and cherry-picked everything remotely scandalous. It was the opposite of the book I was trying to write. But the publisher had the right to do it. Are there still people who simply refuse to take her seriously? Every day. Some people hear you’re writing about Kim Kardashian, and their face sinks. When Vanity Fair ran an excerpt and collaborated with me on Instagram, a ton of comments came into my feed. I’d never really studied them. There’s a group that says, “She’s only famous because of a sex tape. It’s not that deep, bro.” They don’t want analysis of any kind. When Kim finally followed me on Instagram, people started sending messages asking me to get their clothing lines to her. She hadn’t even followed me during the five years I was writing the book. Clockwise: Magazine writer and editor Jonathan Van Meter. Lady Gaga spotted leaving Chez André in 2010 in Paris(Van Meter is second from left). From left: Van Meter, Renée Zellweger and artist Ross Bleckner in 2005. Kendall Jenner ran out of gas in Beverly Hills in 2016, the year that Van Meter wrote about Kendall for her first Vogue cover and in the process met Kris Jenner and Kim Kardashian. Jason Schmidt/Marc Piasecki/Filmmagic/Fameflynet.uk.com/Splashnews.com/Lisa Mauceri/Filmmagic Why Kim? You could have chosen any number of subjects. I wrote a Vogue cover story about her in 2019. When it came out, she called me from Bali, at three in the morning, and said, “There’s no better feeling in the world than when someone gets you.” I said, “I’m going to write a book about you someday.” Then the pandemic happened, I drank for three months, I sobered up, and I thought, “What am I going to do? Why not a book about Kim?” I talked to my agent, Todd Shuster, and began texting her. There was never any resistance. I could tell she was game. Eventually I said I was coming to L.A. for three months in the summer of 2021. And I started going to her house. Nothing was ever signed. She stayed committed for five years. I thought it would take two years, and so did she, but she never bailed. That seems extraordinary for somebody so famously controlling of her image. What were the ground rules? My agent talked to her lawyer. We called it the Todd Summit because they were both named Todd. The only precondition was that Kim got to read the book for fact-checking. Nobody said, “You can’t talk to these people,” or, “She won’t discuss that.” We just jumped in. It made me wonder whether the idea that she’s controlling about everything is wrong. Maybe this is how she is. But “fact-checking” can mean different things to different people. What happened when she disliked something? She did her homework. She went through it page by page: “Page 33, this is wrong. That was 2002.” Then we had a Zoom with two people who work for her and another long phone call. That’s when she said things like, “This part, really? Do we have to?” And I’d say, “We do.” What was she most upset about? The number one thing was the way I wrote about her father. She kept saying, “There’s just a tone.” And when I looked again, I thought, “You know what? She’s right.” It was a little snarky. He’s been dead for so long that he had stopped feeling like a real person to me. To her, he’s still alive in her mind. She also thought the sex tape material went on too long, and the Damon Thomas [Kardashian’s first husband] material made her squirm. But she read a couple of other chapters [about her earlier years] and cried because they were so true to her experience as a 13-year-old. She said it made her give that little girl some grace. In the end, she accepted the material she had objected to. I cut two sentences for her because they concerned her safety. “She wanted to be famous so badly,she got exactly what she wanted,and she loves it.” Jonathan Van Meter, on Kardashian (pictured in ninth grade) @kimkardashian/Instagram. Has her family read it? A couple of months ago, Kim called me late at night. She’d been at Khloé’s house, where Khloé told her Kris had flipped out on camera while they were filming the show. She was yelling, “Why did Kim drag us all into this? Why is my affair from 30 years ago in the book?” Two days later, Kris was fine. But it’s going to be on the show. Kim said to her mother: “All this stuff gets written about us, and then a guy comes along who gets us and wants to explain us. Why wouldn’t you want that?” That’s the closest I got to an answer about why she did the book. So why did she take that risk in the first place? Was she looking for legitimacy? I think that’s the simplest answer. She’d been written about for years through scandal and gossip, and here was somebody who wanted to really explain her. But in 2020, that felt more urgent than it does now. People increasingly understand that her criminal justice work is real, that she studied law seriously. There are still people who hear you’re writing a biography of Kim Kardashian and look at you as though you’ve lost your mind. It’s in the first line of the book: You can tell a lot about a person when you say you’re writing a book about Kim Kardashian. She has documented so much of her own life already. What could you discover that wasn’t already splashed across television or Instagram? Her life is so self-mediated. Nobody had really told it from a writer’s perspective. She understood that: “I know this book is from your point of view. It’s your book.” The challenge was vulnerability. Her childhood friends said she never showed it, even as a little girl. You couldn’t tell how she felt about difficult things. What she did intuit was how journalism works. Most people outside the business don’t understand the difference between “off the record” and “on background.” Kim did. She’d say, “I’ll tell you this whole weird, crazy, dark story, and then we can decide what words I want to come out of my mouth. I want you to know it and I want you to write about it, but I don’t want it coming from me.” It took until the summer of 2024, when I spent time with her in Malibu, before she really cracked open. What changed in Malibu? The visits were open-ended, and she was alone. Before that, I’d interview her while she worked out, or she’d call while getting her hair dyed. We’d talk at photo shoots, with a whole glam squad around. I estimate we spent something like 50 hours together going back to 2019. She could be completely open, but there was a boundary. In Malibu, it was just, “Come over.” We’d hang out in the living room. Most of the time she was in sweats, without makeup. Once she had just had a needling procedure and her face was bruised. Another time she came down the staircase in this gold outfit, fully made up, from a child’s dinosaur-themed birthday party. I asked what she was dressed as. She said, “Cleopatra.” Tell me about your first real dinner together. Casa Vega, in the Valley. She drove herself up in a Range Rover, wearing a full-length black leather coat and boots. We sat down, and she was just like every other girl. She ordered a strawberry daiquiri, took three sips, and I asked if I could finish it. Then she noticed girls at another table filming her. They eventually approached us, pretty aggressively. She handled it like a pro. I was struck by how normal she could be in a situation that was completely abnormal. Paris HIlton and Kardashian in 2006. Van Meter noted that Hilton canceled their interview 17 times over about four months: “Eventually I thought the cancellations were more interesting than whatever she’d tell me. Kim was so mad when I told her. It seemed to stir up some ancient irritation between them. The creation turning on the creator.” Chris Polk/Filmmagic For Bragman Nyman Cafarelli You also saw her deal with her daughter North when she was upset. There was a Vogue shoot, and North had imagined that she and Kim would wear matching dresses. When they didn’t, she had a meltdown. Kim took her away. Later she told me they’d laid on the bed together for about 15 minutes without talking. She just held her until she calmed down, then explained things to her. I remember thinking, “My mother never did that for me.” It made me feel Kim trusted me with something parents don’t necessarily want outsiders to see. I know you grew up in relatively modest circumstances in Atlantic City. Were you surprised by the scale of Kim’s life? I walked into her house one day and saw a woman mopping floors way off in the distance. It reminded me of The Crown, where you occasionally see somebody vacuuming Buckingham Palace. There’s always somebody cleaning, a chef, nannies, assistants. But I never felt the grossness I’ve sometimes felt around very rich people. It felt warm. At the same time, there are gates into Hidden Hills and then another gate and armed security. It’s a bubble. How much of the apparent domestic normalcy survives the machinery around her? Both things exist. You go through a gate into Hidden Hills, then through another gate at her house, and there’s armed security. But the family lives nearby, and the kids ride their bikes between houses. In Malibu, she told me she bought the house next door so the employees could work and park over there. She was trying to get the chaos out of her home. And there were odd, unguarded moments. At a photo shoot, I looked up from my phone and she was completely naked while people helped her change. Neither of us flinched. At another shoot, she was texting like a chainsaw, but she still heard every word of the conversation happening around her. You watched her work up close. How much of the business is actually Kim and how much is the team around her? I went to see her one day when she was shooting two back-to-back covers — one of them was Vogue Hong Kong. We were in the glam room, and she was directing everything: the air-conditioning, the music, the makeup. And at the same time, she was on the phone with Tyra Banks, trying to persuade her to appear in a Skims campaign with other supermodels. Tyra was feeling insecure. Kim spent hours lovingly talking her into it. I thought, “That’s Anna Wintour plus an advertising agency plus the model in the shoot.” She was wearing seven hats at once. Skims isn’t just underwear. It’s a platform and a fashion company and a very strange conglomeration of things. It’s also an empire that was launched by a sex tape. How do you think that happened? Do you see her as someone exploited by a humiliating episode or someone who brilliantly capitalized on it? Both. I think she was humiliated by it and at some point decided to capitalize on something beyond her control. We talked about its effect on her life almost from the beginning. But she can’t really talk about exactly how it happened. Ray J and Kim were together for years, filming all kinds of things, including sex. Somehow footage ended up with Vivid. I don’t know how that happened, and Kim is never going to tell. Ray J has claimed that Kris Jenner was involved in arranging its release. If that turned out to be true, wouldn’t it change your understanding of their entire origin story? No, it wouldn’t! And I still don’t believe Kris had anything to do with it. But you didn’t interview Ray J. No. Nor Kanye West, arguably the most important creative influence on her transformation into a fashion icon. Wasn’t that a significant hole in your reporting? Kim initially said, “Of course he’s going to talk to you.” But as his behavior grew more troubling, I didn’t think it would be ethical to interview somebody in the middle of a mental health crisis. Years ago, I profiled someone who was high out of her mind, and I thought, “This is like date rape. There’s no consent here.” I promised myself I’d never let that happen again. When he tipped into raging antisemitism, I thought it might ruin the book. He was central to her life, and suddenly he was a pariah. But Kim managed to separate herself from that, and in a way his absence kept the focus on her story. Later someone said that if you get him on the phone, he’ll talk for seven hours. I didn’t need seven hours straight from Kanye West. Was there anyone who turned you down? Paris Hilton. Late in the process, I told Kim I should talk to her. Kim checked and said Paris agreed, but I had to go through her publicist. That was unusual: With everybody else, Kim just sent a text. I sent questions, connected with Paris’ assistant, and then the interview was canceled 17 times over about four months. Eventually I thought the cancellations were more interesting than whatever she’d tell me. Kim was so mad when I told her. It seemed to stir up some ancient irritation between them. The creation turning on the creator. What did the interviews with her sisters reveal to you about the family? Kourtney took about nine months to talk to me. At one point, her assistant asked if we could do it while they filmed the show, which I didn’t think Kim would appreciate. Khloé jumped right in. Kim told her she didn’t have to get glammed up, and of course she got fully glammed up. I became convinced that what you see on the show is mostly real. Kim and Kourtney can be wicked to each other. Kim and Khloé are genuinely close. Kendall and Kylie are so much younger that Kim has almost maternal pride in them. She once said to me, “My mom made all of her mistakes on me.” By the time she got to Kylie, she’d perfected it. I know you spent a whole lot of time with their grandmother MJ. She was one of the warmest people I’ve ever met. She told me the history of the maternal side of the family going back to Arkansas. Again and again these women would divorce a shitty man and open a store. Kim’s mother is Kris, Kris’ mother is MJ, and before that there was Lou Ethel and Tiny. You begin to see a family history of women making their own way. So who’s the head matriarch now — Kris or Kim? It’s already shifting to Kim. In Malibu in 2024, she said to me, “I’m the one who pushes everybody. It’s me. It’s not my mom.” Did the family help you understand her or did they mostly reinforce the version of themselves we already know? I first spent time with the family years earlier when I profiled Kendall. We drove around Calabasas and Hidden Hills, played miniature golf and ran out of gas. Kris cooked dinner one night. I asked where I could have a cigarette, and she said, “Come with me.” We picked up our vodka drinks and smoked by the pool. I thought, “I love this woman.” That experience made me receptive to Kim before I really knew her. It was the opposite of what people assume about the family. Doesn’t that suggest you’d already lost some journalistic distance even before you started the book? Maybe. But I was also trying to get past a kind of reflexive contempt. When the book was announced, people would visibly recoil. Some people simply don’t want any serious analysis of Kim. But you don’t have to like her to recognize her enormous effect on the culture. Anna Wintour blurbed your book. When Vogue first put Kim on the cover, readers canceled their subscriptions. What finally brought Anna around? Probably some combination of Kanye’s relentless campaign, realizing that magazines were in trouble and that people like Kim had millions of followers, and recognizing that the world was changing. Hollywood got Kim sooner. They could see that Kris and Kim are powerful and make money. But people like Graydon Carter and Maureen Dowd thought it was nonsense. Every time Maureen Dowd dropped Kim’s name into her column without actually writing about her, I thought, “What are you doing?” It felt like using her for clicks. But Kim doesn’t care. It just doesn’t mean anything to her. The subtitle calls Kim “The Woman Who Created the Future.” What does that mean? That subtitle was suggested to me, and at first I said, “That’s not right.” Then weeks went by, and I thought, “Actually, hmm.” As a teenager, she was selling things on eBay before anybody had heard of eBay. She had a blog with members — essentially followers — and posted videos of herself talking about dating. She was an early adopter of every single one of these things. People only look at what happened after 2007. Everything before she was famous was the stuff I cared about most. Isn’t that also a future of relentless materialism and everyone making themselves the center of the universe? Isn’t that what people don’t like about her? Yes, but I don’t subscribe to that pessimism. I’m enjoying big parts of this new world. We’re all walking behind Kim, smelling the pretty flowers. There are still amazing movies and books and artists doing everything they do, and then there’s also this weird new way to live. You and I both post our lives on Instagram. I don’t get celebrity hate. Famous people need to move differently than us because of the chaos they create. Let them be amazing and weird. Why are people so mad at Taylor Swift? What did she do? It’s like the royal family. People are willing to sacrifice their lives and put on a show for us. Enjoy the fucking show. The Kardashians get credit for expanding who gets to be glamorous, but they also make beauty feel like an expensive, impossible project. How does Kim deal with that contradiction? I’m not sure she does. She doesn’t dwell on it. I didn’t write about this because it became so weird and complicated, but Kim has never had invasive plastic surgery. Her butt and boobs and nose — those are all her own … How do you know? Because she told me, and I trusted her. She said there were two plastic surgeons the family is friends with who used to fight about whether she’d had a nose job — each one thought the other had done it. Finally she said, “Take an X-ray. Nobody has given me a fucking nose job.” She has spent years on criminal justice work and studying law. Is that a way of retroactively giving her celebrity meaning? Who would choose something so thankless? She told me publicists used to say she should pick a charity, and she’d say, “I’m not going to pick a charity. It’s not a pair of shoes.” She got interested in the justice system and felt stupid in meetings because she didn’t know what DOJ stood for. Someone told her she could become a lawyer. She spent years doing the work. I think the part of her that wants her life to have purpose is real. What about her new acting and producing ambitions? I was disappointed at first. I thought the coolest thing about her was that she wasn’t an actress. She’s a performance artist in the Warhol vein. But she‘s possessed by this need to prove herself. She’s said to me many times, “Maybe I’m just the girl with a sex tape with a lot to prove.” Why else would a billionaire spend six years studying law? She also wants work in Los Angeles, near her kids. I think she knows her life is going to change and is preparing for it. What does Kim look like when she’s no longer the most famous person in the world? She once told me that maybe someday she’ll hang up KKW and hang out a shingle, and the law firm will be KKW. Andy, my husband, joked the other day that in 20 years she’ll be writing a book called President Kim. What do you think is her greatest strength? She’s unflappable. Things don’t shake her for long. I’m the opposite — completely flappable, emotionally unregulated. I envied her. People also misunderstand what she is. She’s not a pop star or an actress. She functions as a businesswoman. There’s no obvious comparison. I think she’s closer to Jane Fonda than Marilyn Monroe. She likes provoking people. She knew wearing Marilyn’s dress [at the 2022 Met Gala] would make people angry. She told me, “Of course I knew it.” What’s one thing from this process that still sticks with you? Allison Statter, Irving Azoff’s daughter, was my secret weapon. She and Kim grew up together. Kim has a visual memory — she remembers what she was wearing and what the weather was like. Allison has her emotional memory. At her house in Beverly Hills, under this giant photograph of Stevie Nicks, she was describing how difficult it is to arrange something as simple as lunch with Kim. All the people and the chaos, when she just wants to get a salad. Then she stopped and wailed, “What have you done, Kim?” We were in stitches. When I ran it by Kim, she wanted to defend herself a little. But her very best friend asking “what have you done?” — that stayed with me. After all these years of being dismissed, do you think she’s happy with the life she’s built? Yes. Joan Rivers loved being famous. She never lost the light in her eye when the limo pulled up. I hadn’t met anybody else like that until Kim. She wanted to be famous so badly, she got exactly what she wanted, and she loves it. You’ve written about powerful women for decades. Did you ever worry that you’d fallen too much in love with this one to write about her objectively? I definitely lost the plot. My mother died at the beginning of the project, and Kim is very maternal. I think there was some transference. My therapist said, “You have been induced with her feelings.” I put that on a Post-it on my wall. I started feeling protective of her, thinking, “Oh God, just be nicer to her.” I feel seen and gotten and loved by her. I’ve done this for so long, and somehow I fell for it. But I don’t think it was fake. It was real. How did you get enough distance to finish the book? Therapy helped. My therapist said, “You‘ve kind of turned into her therapist. But no therapist has to file a report that gets published for the world to see, and that’s what you now have to do.” That was hard. I didn’t want to hurt her or slut-shame her all over again. But I had to write the story of how she became Kim. Sometimes I was crying, thinking, “I don’t know how to do this.” In the end, I’m proud of the book. I didn’t want a dutiful biography that retold every stupid thing we’ve already seen on the internet. I wanted to get to the guts of it. This story appeared in the Oct. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.