Citizen Kim: The Woman Who Created the Future
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.
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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.
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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.
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