'Citizen Kim' explains Kim Kardashian to her haters. It almost worked on me

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Kim Kardashian did no extracurricular activities in high school. None.

As Jonathan Van Meter writes in his new authorized biography, "Citizen Kim," which was released Tuesday, "she participated in no clubs; she joined no debate teams; she performed in no theater productions. She played no competitive sports, opting instead for aerobics at six a.m. with her mother before school."

Wait, nothing? Like, not even sports?

Somehow, after 330 pages of Kardashian lore, told nonlinearly and spanning from 2026 back to her Armenian ancestors, this was one detail that I couldn't shake.

Since I started working in legacy media 10 years ago, I've found that most of my colleagues were once teenagers like me: overachieving, overbooked and overinvested in "a good college" that would lead to "a good job."

Kim Kardashian was not one of us. "I just really hated the college experience," Kardashian told Van Meter during one of the many interviews he conducted over several years spent with insanely intimate access to Kardashian. When Kim visited Kourtney at the University of Arizona, she was unimpressed. "From what I saw, it was just, like, a lot of partying and stuff that I didn't care about."

Pearl clutch.

There were so many moments like this in "Citizen Kim" that helped me better understand why nerds like myself were so quick to make fun of Kardashian and so slow to understand her power and appeal.

We could admire and understand hardworking, perfectionist pop culture figures like Beyoncé, Martha Stewart and Michelle Obama. We could act out vicariously through the public messiness of Courtney Love, Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse.

But Kardashian was neither a dropout nor a valedictorian. Friends and family remember her as a beautiful and obedient girl who neither rebelled nor excelled at school. What are we supposed to do with that?

In pleading his case for Kardashian's relevance, Van Meter invokes names like Marshall McLuhan, Joan Didion, Immanuel Kant and Camille Paglia and uses fancy neologisms like "hyperobject" and "multipotentialite." He's clearly the right man for the job when it comes to making Kardashian more palatable to dorks and snobs like me.

Over his long career, Van Meter has gotten remarkably good at engendering trust with the powerful women he profiles, including Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey and Jill Biden. His 1990 profile of Linda Evangelista included the quote "We don't wake up for less than $10,000 a day," which became shorthand for fashion's supermodel era and helped Van Meter become one of Anna Wintour's go-to Vogue writers for decades.

When asked by the New York Times why she cooperated with Van Meter's book, Kardashian replied, "Why wouldn't I want something that was a little bit more authentic and just completely real?"

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. Wealth can inure you to lots of pain, but it doesn't eliminate suffering.

At 14, her mom's friend Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered. Her dad defended O.J. Simpson, who Kris Jenner and her then-husband, Bruce Jenner, always believed was guilty. (Caitlyn Jenner prefers that people use the name "Bruce" and he/him pronouns when discussing her life pre-transition.) At 16, after her boyfriend TJ Jackson's mother was murdered, he moved in with the family, and Kim became a kind of hybrid girlfriend/sister/mother to him. At 19, she secretly married the musician Damon Thomas, whom she described in her divorce filings as controlling and cruel.

Van Meter writes deftly about the pain Kardashian lived through as a teenager and the horrific trauma she endured when she was robbed at gunpoint in Paris in 2016. And he valiantly and repeatedly tries to squeeze self-reflection from his subject, who seems allergic to introspection. Instead, Kim offers lots of memories of what she was wearing during terrible moments in her life and even more relentless, insistent, future-facing optimism.

For me, the most surprising sections of "Citizen Kim" were the passages detailing her proximity to megalomaniacs. Both Kardashian and Van Meter treat Kanye West's mental illness with care and compassion. Kim speaks carefully about the father of her children but acknowledges the pain caused by his antisemitism, public insults and erratic presence as a father. Van Meter decided not to approach West, now legally known as Ye, saying in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, "I didn't think it would be ethical to interview somebody in the middle of a mental health crisis."

I was also struck by Van Meter's meticulous reportage on Kardashian's visit to the White House during Donald Trump's first term as president, which ultimately led to the pardon and release of Alice Johnson, a first-time drug offender whose story inspired Kardashian to begin advocating for criminal justice reform.

On her decision to meet with Trump, Kardashian said: "Everyone was telling me, ‘Don't go, your career will be over; you can't step foot in there.' And I was like, ‘It's my reputation over someone's life?' Weigh that out. People talk s--- about me all day long. It will just be another story about me versus someone getting their life back."

Van Meter does a heroic job of explaining some of the grossest extravagances perpetrated by Kim, like the time in 2019 when she celebrated her mother's 65th birthday by hosting a party in a fully re-created version of their childhood home. Kim badgered the new owner until he relented and let her rent the house. She ordered custom re-creations of their 1980s furniture. She parked four luxury vehicles that were the same make and model as the ones her parents used to drive. She put Kris's old vanity plates on them. She had the meal catered by the Ivy. The surprise took months of planning and cost … I don't know, 6 squillion bajillion dollars?

Miraculously, Van Meter was able to contextualize this insane behavior: Kris was always sentimental and nostalgic, extolling the virtues of "memory making," constantly throwing bombastic parties and documenting them with her ever-rolling home video camera; Kim comes from a long line of shopkeepers, for whom selling physical objects was their lifeblood and liberation; for generations, every time a woman in the family was scorned or wronged by a husband, she rebounded by hanging her own shingle. Reading "Citizen Kim," gigantic, materialistic stunts begin to sound like a family's shared love language.

But 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.

He saves one of Kim's most controversial public acts for the end of the book. In 2022, Kardashian famously told Variety, "It seems like nobody wants to work these days."

Van Meter was nearby when it happened. "Kim was in a mood that day," he wrote. "Full of beans, as they say." According to him, she had been "juggling chainsaws," simultaneously navigating backlash to a Vogue cover story, several media appearances and attempts from Dave Chappelle to broker peace between herself and her ex-husband West.

"Citizen Kim" called her Variety interview "Kim's first OK, Boomer moment." I would have liked him to give us more than that. It's deeply nauseating to hear a billionaire living through the greatest era of wealth inequality in U.S. history scold other people's work ethic. It's worth considering the possibility that this wasn't a slip of the tongue on a bad day, but a slip of the mask from someone with genuine disdain for the poor people whose labor, dollars and attention she lives off.

I sincerely enjoyed learning that Kardashian's plane "Kim Air" was painted in the Pantone color Pewter. ("It's a shade of nudey gray. Which is so me," she said.) I would have appreciated at least a canned answer about how she thinks about the environmental impact of traveling in a $150 million private jet.

But if Van Meter were the type of journalist to perseverate on such things, he probably wouldn't be the go-to guy for our most fabulous and powerful women. And without that velvet touch, we wouldn't get a book like this, which has a few flaws but a whole lot of insight.

The most compelling argument in "Citizen Kim," the one that I will be chewing on for a long time, came within the first 20 pages:

One reason why you ought to care about the Kardashian-Jenner empire, whatever you may think of its merits, is that it's completely new. Kim, Kourtney, Khloé, Kendall, Kylie, and Kris comprise something unprecedented in American life: a matriarchy. If it was the 1600s, such a powerful coven of women might have been burned at the stake.

When I finished my extracurricular-heavy high school education and went to college, I spent a lot of time reading about patriarchy and pondering what a matriarchy might look like. Wild to think that I might have found out if I put down the books and turned on "Keeping Up With the Kardashians."

Shane O'Neill connects the dots between entertainment news, internet fads, celebrity gossip and pop culture ephemera to sketch a portrait of how we live today.