Kim Kardashian West offers ‘More Me’
New edition of book features more selfies but not much insight
The publication of the new, expanded edition of Kim Kardashian West’s 2015 book of selfportraits, “Selfish,” comes at an unusual moment for the reality star.
Following her being robbed at gunpoint at a luxury residence in Paris in the early-morning hours of Oct. 3, Kardashian West has taken an atypical social media break, and has reportedly halted (till further notice) her participation in “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.”
This rare and sudden lockdown is in stark contrast to Kardashian West’s usual modus operandi, which might be summed up with the words “More Me!” — which appear on a gold sticker on the cover of the new edition of “Selfish” ($19.95). The utterance is so on the nose, up-for-it exclamation point and all, that it surely must be self-aware.
The current edition, the sticker also assures us, includes “new selfies 2015-2016,” adding some pictures of her with her second child, Saint, born in 2015, and some Snapchat-filtered portraits, an innovation not available at the time of the first edition’s publication.
This is, then, a book for her completists, those who remain somehow unsated by the constant stream of images of the star, by the star, offered on multiple online platforms. And so they require an as-up-to-the-moment-as-possible selection of these images, packaged into a handsome fetish object by the art publisher Rizzoli.
It is a pleasingly compact white brick of a book, whose cover bears a blurry Juergen Telleresque selfie of Kardashian West, her lips pursed in a kiss.
It’s easy to assign a negative value to the baroquely egocentric moreness that is part and parcel of “Selfish” in particular, and the Kim Kardashian West phenomenon in general. And indeed, many have done just that.
Most recently, Karl Lagerfeld chastised Kardashian West for her incautious displays of wealth on social media, suggesting this constant flaunting of herself may have played a part in making her a target. Others have gone as far as to say that the robbery must have been staged to serve as yet another histrionic plot point in the Kardashian family chronicle, an artificial peak in the topography of its star’s life that is by now well trodden.
But painting her constant self-documentation, fabulous riches and all, as a type of irrational exuberance, a wild, careless jag sure to end in disaster — whether fiscal or moral — misses one of the more interesting things about her, and about “Selfish.” What characterizes the book — and Kardashian West’s persona more broadly — is a reliable, bland steadiness, pleasurable because of (and not despite) its lulling dependability, its ability to turn any emotional summit or vale into something of a plain.
The book, peppered with handwritten captions, is arranged chronologically. It begins with a brief dip into the pre-“Keeping Up With the Kardashians” years, when Kardashian West served in the reduced but instructive double role of Paris Hilton’s BFF/ assistant (“She showed me a whole new world”).
It continues through the show’s 2007 debut and Kardashian West’s attendant celebrity status, to the later, Versailles years: the marriage to Kanye West, the acceptance by Vogue and the rest of the fashion establishment, the international celebrity.
Kardashian West’s rise has been remarkable, and her look, as presented in “Selfish,” becomes more polished, more high fashion, ever richer, with increasingly lustrous surfaces. But her essential opacity remains a constant, the pleasing angles of her gorgeous face unfailingly presented to their best advantage.
And the captions she includes in the book reveal only the barest minimum of an inner life, giving very little for Kardashian Kremlinologists to work with (“Bikini selfies are my fave”; “One of my family’s favourite places to eat is Nobu Malibu”; “#gymselfies”).
She is also never (and this is, frankly, inspiring) ashamed of anything. As she writes of some leaked nude selfies: “I’m not mad at them LOL.” You can almost hear Kardashian West’s voice in these words, with its soothingly melodic Valley-girl-on-Xanax lilt.
A middle section of “Selfish” includes racier fare, but even the pictures that present more skin have a reassuringly same-as-ever quality (“6 months after baby and I’m feeling sexy again”), her reliably spectacular body serving as a perpetual transitional object for an anxious public.
This evenness may seem counterintuitive. Kardashian West’s life has been structured around drama, not to say melodrama: from the O.J. Simpson trial, at which her father, Robert Kardashian, served on the defence team when she was still a teenager, to, later, a leaked sex tape and the reality show that followed, with its many twists and turns — a quick marriage to a basketball player and a quicker divorce; another marriage, this time to a rap megastar; a stepparent’s gender transition; and so much more. We’ve kept watching her show seemingly to see what happens next.
But because of the lag between an event — already made news by the Kardashians’ celebrity — and its aired documentation, what has increasingly ended up being the case is that we’ve continued to watch not for any single plot point but for the family members’ unpacking of it.
This constant retreading of already mined territory has come to define Kardashian West’s persona, even when the gap between an event and its documentation is mere seconds, as is often the case with her social media posts.
Able to serenely convert all manner of potential pain or happiness into plot fodder, the preternaturally unperturbed star is an aspirational subject exactly because of her uncanny ability to withstand and master the relentless, rollicking shocks that contemporary life serves up.
There is something impressive, if not exactly admirable, about this. And while it is still uncertain whether Kardashian West will be able to retain it in the face of recent events and reemerge in the public eye, we can only hope for her return. In uncertain times, America needs her.