There is a small parenthetical tucked inside Citizen Kim that says more about Kim Kardashian than most headlines ever have. She may be, Jonathan Van Meter writes, the only person who routinely takes the red-eye in the wrong direction.

He means it literally. After a night like the Met Gala, when most of New York is heading to the after-parties, Kim boards her plane and flies across the country in the dark so she can land in Los Angeles in time to drive her children to school. She does it nearly every day. “She even walks some of them into school and helps them put their things in their lockers,” Van Meter says.

It is a detail that captures the woman he spent years getting to know: someone the world believes it has figured out, and someone who keeps quietly proving it wrong.

“There’s no better feeling in the world than when someone gets you”

The book began with a phone call. In 2019, Van Meter wrote Kim’s cover story for American Vogue, and afterward she called to tell him, “There’s no better feeling in the world than when someone gets you.” Before he could stop himself, he told her he would write a book about her someday.

He had always wanted to write about a woman with enormous fame and power, someone in the vein of Oprah or Hillary Clinton. He is drawn to people who are often misunderstood, and in Kim he found what he calls the ultimate misunderstood woman, someone whose public image and private reality seemed impossibly far apart. No one, he felt, had yet gathered all the pieces of her story and put them together in one place.

A big sister, plus

Van Meter’s view of Kim had been shifting long before that call. Nearly a decade ago, while writing about Kendall Jenner for Vogue, he spoke with Kim by phone for the first time. Kendall is fifteen years younger, and Kim, he says, is maternal with everyone, but especially with her: “She’s a big sister plus.”

When he asked what Kendall was like as a teenager, he expected a polished soundbite. Instead, Kim gave him a tender, deeply honest answer about Kendall’s struggle with severe acne and the loneliness that came with it. Kendall, she said, was closer to her horse than to most kids her age. She desperately wanted to be a model and feared her skin would ruin everything, so Kim made it her mission to get her sister the help she needed, and then helped her build her modeling book. “And we’ve all seen how that turned out,” Van Meter says. It was not, he notes, how people usually talk to a stranger on the phone about the world’s highest-paid model.

The second shift came during the 2019 cover story, when he learned Kim was already spending eighteen hours a week studying with mentors to become a lawyer. That discovery, more than anything, changed how he saw her, and it is the reason the book exists.

A life built around her kids

Kim runs billion-dollar businesses while raising four children, and Van Meter says it is impossible to spend time with her without seeing which job comes first. She built her extraordinary office less than ten minutes from home. She bought a private jet so she could get back to her kids as quickly as humanly possible. Even her newer ventures in acting and producing happen mostly in Los Angeles, so she can stay close.

“She’s a mother first,” he says. “It’s obvious how much she prioritizes that above everything else.”

She’s a mother first. It’s obvious how much she prioritizes that above everything else.

As for the pressure so many mothers feel to do it all, Van Meter admits Kim makes it look almost effortless. One of his editors once described her as “a hyper-evolved super-creature,” and he does not entirely disagree. He knows it is not easy, but she manages it better than most and rarely complains, which makes the strain hard to spot. He remembers one interview in her home gym, where she was working out with her trainer while also minding a grumpy young Saint, who just wanted his mom. Three things at once, and she handled all of them.

The friend who knows her best

Of all the conversations Van Meter had, one still makes him laugh. Allison Statter has been Kim’s best friend since they were babies; they were born months apart to parents who were best friends themselves. Allison knows Kim perhaps better than anyone except Kris Jenner.

One day, she was describing how surreal it is to watch your best friend become the most famous woman in the world, and how something as simple as grabbing lunch now comes with a full security detail. Then she started laughing and, as if speaking straight to Kim, said, “What have you DONE?” She laughed harder and said it again. Van Meter still uses the line with people in his own life. What. Have. You. Done.

Finding something new in someone everyone knows

How do you uncover anything fresh about a woman whose life has been filmed for decades? For Van Meter, the answer was time. He spent years simply being around: at her house, in the gym, on photo shoots, at the office, riding along in her car. “If you hang around long enough,” he says, “people eventually just become themselves in front of you.”

If you hang around long enough, people eventually just become themselves in front of you.

What emerged, above all, was one word. When Oprah asked him to name the biggest surprise of getting to know Kim, he answered, “Competence.” Her legal studies are the clearest example. Working on criminal justice reform, Kim wanted to hold her own in meetings at the White House and the Department of Justice. Rather than leave the legal work to others, she decided to become a lawyer herself, while already wealthy beyond imagination and raising four children. Van Meter calls it the most extraordinary thing about her.

A book club of two

When asked what he hopes mothers take from the book, Van Meter tells a story instead. His lifelong friend Penelope Green, a writer for The New York Times, read an early manuscript one summer weekend alongside her 29-year-old daughter, Ali. The next morning, the two talked about it for hours.

They came to it from opposite directions. Penelope had never watched a single episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and read the book hoping to understand the daughter who grew up fascinated by Kim. Ali, meanwhile, knew almost nothing about the O.J. Simpson trial, the seismic event that pulled Kim’s family into the spotlight and helped shape her own mother’s generation. Each learned something about the other. Van Meter was thrilled by the thought of it: a mother and daughter, a book club of two, closer for having read the same pages.

What the headlines miss

Kim has told Van Meter many times that keeping her children, and their everyday lives, mostly off the family’s reality show was a trade-off. It protects them from too much scrutiny. But it also means the world rarely gets to see, in her words, “what a good, super-involved mother I am.”

Citizen Kim may be the closest look yet.

The cover of Citizen Kim: The Woman Who Created the Future by Jonathan Van Meter, a black-and-white close-up of Kim Kardashian's face seen through a giant letter K, with the title and author's name in neon yellow on black.

Pre-order Citizen Kim now.

About the book

“Citizen Kim is the kind of intelligent and incisive book that comes along when a great journalist finds his perfect subject. Irresistible.” —Anna Wintour

An unprecedented and intimate account of one of the most business-savvy, influential, and defining icons of our time.

Kim Kardashian is a self-made mogul, social media genius, fashion icon, and unlikely advocate for criminal justice reform. But she is also dismissed as a figure of scandal, spectacle, and reality television. The truth is more complicated—and revealing.

Stylish, incisive, and deeply reported, Citizen Kim is a portrait of a woman we think we know. Born into an Armenian American family in Beverly Hills and marked early by proximity to tragedy and notoriety, Kim’s sense of ambition was evident from the start. She rose from Paris Hilton’s sidekick to tabloid fixation, reality-television star, and ultimately, the luminary of a new celebrity economy—an ascent that reveals how precisely she understood the culture she would come to create in her image.

Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with Kim and dozens of her closest friends, family members, and associates, the book is a symphonic portrait of a woman who comes sharply into focus as the major cultural currents of the past four decades—fame, technology, beauty, capital, family—take shape around her. Cutting through years of self-narration and relentless scrutiny, Jonathan Van Meter reveals a fascinating figure who has repeatedly transformed pressure and trauma into momentum. Equal parts cultural history, high-fashion chronicle, and intimate family study, Citizen Kim is a dazzling, whip-smart exploration of one of the most influential—and misunderstood—celebrities of our time, and the world that made her superstardom possible.

About the author

Jonathan Van Meter is one of America’s foremost magazine writers. A contributing editor at both Vogue and New York magazine, Van Meter writes about Hollywood, media, fashion, society, and politics, and has profiled many of the most consequential figures in American public life. He is also creator and founding editor-in-chief of Vibe magazine, owned in partnership by Quincy Jones and Time Warner, executive producer of the documentary Let’s Get Frank, and author of The Last Good Time.

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