THE INCIDENT

I can tell right away that something is wrong with Kim Kardashian’s smoothie.

For well over a minute now, she’s been swirling her straw around the contents of a large frosted glass in a slow, methodical, appraising way. No one but me seems to have noticed this, or registered it as the uncharacteristic behavior that it is. Which is ironic, because of everyone here, I know Kim the least. Though she’s aware of me — I think, I assume — we haven’t even met. Every one else currently in the kitchen — currently numbering forty or more people I would estimate — have been affiliated with her, employed by her, or otherwise in her orbit for months, years, and in some cases, even lifetimes. They’ve certainly be around her long enough to be aware of her most minor behavioral tics; they’ve certainly been around her long enough to be attuned to the particular rhythm and cadence of her daily routine; they’ve certainly been around her long enough to know that that if her reaction to her morning smoothie is anything other than greedy, exuberant, delirious mouthfuls, then something must be terribly, terribly wrong.

But no one notices her toying with the straw; no one notices the tiny ripples of displeasure beginning to creep across her face; no one notices the clenching of her jaw, or the pursing of her lips, or the narrowing of her eyes, or the shallow puffs of exhalation escaping her nostrils, or the slow but steadily quickening drum-drum-drumming of her fingers on the top of her left thigh. In fact, no one seems to notice her at all. 

For a moment it strikes me as strange that the person of the center of all this can, even for a moment, go unnoticed, but then it occurs to me that it’s actually a natural, and even inevitable by-product of possessing the level of fame that Kim now does. Because while it’s true that every person in this room is here because of her, they’re not actually there in the service of Kim Kardashian: they’re there in the service of Kim Kardashian: Bold-face, capital “K”, registered, trademarked, incorporated, Kim Kardashian. 

It’s a curious by-product of fame, and especially of extreme fame, the splintering apart of a person into discrete entities: each one a province unto itself managed and maintained by vast networks of people who owe their lives and livelihoods to the complex upkeep and maintenance of one single facet of one single person. One single person whose hair, and eyes, and lips, and skin, and nails, and breasts, and ass and voice, and scent, and virtually every other characteristic that can be made in some way distinct and therefore commodifiable is managed like a corporation; which, more often than not, is because it literally is one.

Stylists jockey with designers who fend off creative directors, trend forecasters, and a panoply of ever-finer-grained breeds of consultants who are themselves ensnared in their own tiny wars with even more absurdly specialized specialists and sub-consultants. Hair stylists, colorists, and experts of every description unload trunk after trunk of specialized products, tools, and apparatuses, along with heaps — unruly mounds, even — of human hair of every color, and consistency — all or none of which may or may not be used on any given day, subject to the inarticulably complex calculus which everyone implicitly understands but no one can articulate. Vast cadres of makeup artists, each of whom has their own, fine-grained speciality from which they never deviate, arrive trailed by vaster-still legions of subordinates who lug and haul tens of thousands of dollars worth of makeup to account for every conceivable outfit, environmental condition, personal preference or whim. Dozens of administrative assistants breathlessly manage and direct of the relentless onslaught of requests coming from the press office of an inconceivably vast and varied array of brands, media outlets, publications, institutions, and éminence grises of the fame industrial complex, each one of them desperate to achieve some proximity to the Woman herself, and to thereby unleash the an avalanche of attention, notoriety, and most of all, cold hard cash that such an association all but guarantees. Which is to say nothing of the orgy of lawyers, agents, press reps, media consultants, or the carnival of supplicants, flatterers, professional hangers-on and every other unaccounted for, indescribable, utterly parasitic presence that has descended upon Kim’s fetid swamp of fame.

But Kim Kardashian, the actual woman at the center of it all just sits there: silent, unmoving, unnoticed. 

She’s stopped stirring the straw now. Beads of condensation have begun to streak down the glass and at pool at its base, but still, she does nothing. Finally, she removes the straw from the glass, raises it to her mouth, and allows the few drops of the liquid lodged within to fall into her mouth before closing her lips around the tip, sucking out the remainder of its contents then licking off the residue from its exterior. She pauses.

“YOU GUYSSSS….” Kim starts in her inimitable crackling, moaning style of speech, addressing no one in particular, which is, by default, everyone in general. “This smoothie is like HONESTLY SO FUCKING thick…”

A flurry of attendants immediately engulf her and swiftly remove the offending beverage. If only a moment before, she was undisturbed to the point of being unnoticed, now she is all that anyone in the kitchen can see or hear or think about. It’s impossible to say precisely how many individuals have descended upon her, but certainly no fewer than fifteen. In an instant, she’s lost in a thicket of limbs, iPhones, iPads, food items, and numerous other bottled beverages. As I observe this swelling mass, I can begin to intuit something of a hierarchy. In time it becomes clear that there’s one person who is ultimately going to assume, or rather, be assigned responsibility for this mishap: Nicole, Kim’s executive assistant.

“HONESTLY Nicole. I like LITERALLY can’t even sip it. It’s like, fucking…like, it’s like, FUCKING cement. Like SERIOUSLY.”

“Omigawd, wowwww….It is!!! Like LITERALLY SO thick!!!” Nicole drones in an especially grating pantomime of Kim’s vocal patterns that I would assume was mockery if Nicole wasn’t so manifestly dull and un-ironical as to be incapable of such things. “Wow. I’m like SO sorry Kim, I like, ACTUALLY don’t know what happened bu—”

“Yeah, well it’s ACTUALLY your fucking job to know what happened. Like, SERIOUSLY.”

“Okay no, TOTALLY.” Nicole shrieks in a grotesque display of servility and self-abnegation that is all but required of her in this position. 

“Like, HONESTLY, Nicole? I’ve been up since FIVE FUCKING AM, I’m just like, sitting her waiting for like, a MILLION FUCKING YEARS and all I want to do is just DRINK MY FUCKING SMOOTHIE while everyone else just like, LITERALLY DOES THEIR FUCKING JOBS.”

“TOTALLLLLLY” Nicole concurs with a terrorized false cheer that is somehow even more off-off-putting than the aforementioned servility and self-abnegation. 

“HEY ERIK!!!” Nicole shouts over in the direction of Erik, Kim’s pastry chef — though in name only. Pursuant to Kim’s forbidding but starkly effective dietary regime — high protein starvation by any other name — Erik’s focus has in recent years shifted from more traditional dessert fare to breakfast items and various plant-based snacks. I rise up on my tip-toes so that I can get a better look at him through the mass of people that have coalesced tightly around Kim and the smoothie — though even through this scrum, his 6’4” frame is hard to miss. Studying him more carefully now, he’s even more striking than I had previously noted.

He’s the sort of man who exudes an air of total certainty in all matters without once trespassing into arrogance; he’s the sort of man whose every leading suggestion feels like a smooth, soft, baritone confirmation of your own, correct impulses; he’s the sort of man who seems to draw from some strange and unknowable well of supreme self-assurance that is most likely just extreme — and deserved — sexual confidence.

He’s handsome, but in a craggy, asymmetrical way that somehow has the effect of making him even more attractive than if his features were rendered more regularly. Looking at him now, I can somehow imagine singing to him, in the style of Fred Astaire “I love your fun-ny face; your sun-ny, fun-ny face” without a trace of irony. And even though he wouldn’t get the reference because he didn’t really have much access to classic American cinema growing up in the 1970s in Norway, he’d still be charmed by this little gesture, and he’d ask me if I made it up just for him, and I’d lie and say “yes” without even a moment’s hesitation. “And I love YOUR sunny, funny face!” he might parrot back to me eventually, but I’d just place my index finger on his lips to quiet him, then slowly allow my lips to take the place of my finger, and our hot breaths would intermingle — though we wouldn’t even kiss exactly: we'd just take each other in and feel closer than I ever thought two people could feel to one another. 

“Sorry Kim…I guess the avocados weren’t ripe enough!” Erik shouts back in response, completely by-passing and under-cutting Nicole with the most delightful sense of ease.

“Oh, no worries, babe!!!” Kim shouts back: light, amiable, utterly uncaring. “Just whenever you have a chance to make another would be amazing.”

“Sure thing!” Erik shouts back and everyone in the room looks at him with the absolute worst kind of envy: the kind that’s completely undercut by the acknowledgement that he’s deserving of precisely every good thing that has ever come his way, and you, by comparison and by extension, simply are not and never will be. 

“So!” Nicole chirps pleasantly, turning no to Kim “In the mean time, do you maybe want some almonds? Or a piece of fruit? Or like, a green juice or something???”

“Oh, fuck off, Nicole” Kim snaps, without even turning to face her; without even looking at her at all.  

***

I’ve been dispatched to write about Kim and her family. Under normal circumstances, this would be a coup; an career-defining triumph for someone who has only just tentatively parlayed his curious fixation with and rampant speculation about a family of women he had never even hoped to meet into an opportunity to do just that at the closest range and in the most intimate possible terms. It would be the sort of thing that would have the potential to set into motion a chain of events that would alter the rest of my life. But these aren’t normal circumstances. It’s not just a coup and a triumph and an opportunity for me; it’s so much more than that. I’ve been handed enormous power and and potential: certainly greater than I’ve earned; perhaps even greater than I’m capable of wielding. I’m not sure that I can possibly begin to account for, much less explain, much less offer satisfactory resolution to something like the Incident. Perhaps no one can.

The past eight months have been, even by the improbable standards that have governed Kim Kardashian’s life, completely and utterly unprecedented. And yet from the Kardashian-Jenners — a family whose fame, wealth, and power is wholly predicated on the ritual immolation of privacy, discretion, or interiority of any kind — we have heard precisely nothing. As a bonfire of media speculation has raged on, fueled by the endless and too-easy confessions of the vast menagerie of friends, acquaintances, grifters, arrivistes, and prospectors of fame that had set up camp around the family at any point over the last fifteen years, the Most Famous Family in the World has said precisely nothing. Not a statement; not an interview; not a profile; not a post. Not one single word to clarify what they might be thinking, or how they might be feeling, or to otherwise clarify the one thing that everyone in the world desperately wants and needs to know: how did this happen?

But in a sense, I understand their silence. After all, what is there to say? What context or insight or perspective or parsing of terms or forging of meaning could any of them possibly offer any of us on what has now, verifiably, become the most-watched mass media event of all time? What could the individuals at the center of a drama that was captured at close range and from every conceivable angle in glorious, realer-than real HD possibly tell us that we don’t already know, or haven’t already learned by picking it apart and splicing it back together: sharing, posting, GF-ing, and meme-ing every single second of arguably the most consequential 18 hours of the 21st Century.

After the crash, and the fire, and the highjacking, and the car chase — which everyone thought would end at the border — but then just kept on going; after the arrest, and the perp walk, and the whole unseemly spectacle of a minor having to post her grandmother’s bail as the world’s media watched; after the funeral, and the flight risk, and the odd, indescribable except to say pornographic display that occurred — we think; they claim — in international waters…after all of that, what more could possibly be said? 

In a sense, we already know everything we ever will know about that day. And yet? We know nothing at all.

Which is true of Kim and her family as well. For the entire arc of their public lives, they have demonstrated a radical and unprecedented willingness to splay themselves out — mind, spirit, and most of all, body — and allow infinite variations of the desires and obsessions and paranoias of the cultural moment to be projected on to them. So long as there’s a way for them to extract a handsome profit from this arrangement, they’ve kept showing up: eager and willing. They’ve been exalted and demonized; dismissed and praised: in every possible way, on every possible term, from every possible quarter. They’re geniuses and fools and saints and whores; they’re toxic and redemptive and transformational and irrelevant; they’re flagrantly insipid and shockingly brilliant and impossibly nuanced and utterly dimensionless. They’re everything at once, and they’re nothing at all. But most of all — first of all — they’re simply whatever we want them to be. 

Kim’s team contacted me to write the piece. They claimed that Kim was a fan of my work; that she had read every single one of my prior pieces on her; that she felt I had captured some essential quality and uncovered some essential truth about her; that in reading my stories — my glib, acerbic and even caustic little fables plucked from the ephemera of her life — she felt as though she was regarding the version of herself that, to-date, had only ever existed as pure potential. I’m paraphrasing, of course; but it was nonetheless a very generous sentiment conveyed on her behalf. 

Though I will admit that initially, it did seem a little strange: a little strange, that at such a fraught moment and pivotal juncture in her life and career, Kim would willingly turn over her story to someone like me:

Someone like me who had forged what limited notoriety he had through trafficking in absurdist fantasies that treated her as a straw-man marionette in a theatre of escalating cruelty and baroque debasement; 

Someone like me who had, in ways both implicit and explicit, positioned her and her entire family as totems to the metastasizing horror show of economic dysfunction, technologically-abetted narcissism, and an unplaceable but utterly pervasive sense of spiritual rot all which threaten to undo the last fraying threads of societal cohesion and deliver us all into in a final state of perfect solipsism that will only ever be interrupted by spasms of currently-unthinkable violence; 

Someone like me who had devoted hundreds of thousands of words to accusing her — purely as a creative exercise — of such malign acts as arson, animal cruelty, sexual blackmail, vehicular manslaughter, human trafficking, public masturbation, non-consensual sex acts with a minor, initiating then reneging on multiple suicide pacts for amusement, indulging in anti-Semitism so vulgar and extreme that it was actually able to go undetected and then be passed off as pure non-sequitur, and finally, of exploring an incipient capacity for the most extreme and necessarily non-consensual forms of sexual sadism at the expense of her — in so many senses — long-suffering housekeeper. 

And yet, even after all this, in spite of all this, perhaps even because of this, Kim wanted me; Kim chose me; Kim got me.

I had always believed that our fates were bound up, Kim and me. But as the years advanced, and the naive optimism of youth began to be drained from me, and Kim and I seemed to be drawing no nearer to each other, my faith had begun to waver somewhat. Perhaps I had been mistaken all along? Perhaps my fascination with her was just an arbitrary fixation, and obsession, or worst of all, a first manifestation of some greater instability? Perhaps I had endowed the whole project of writing about her life with unearned meaning? Perhaps I had mistaken it — and mistaken her — for something of transcendent meaning and soon enough it would all be exposed for the grand delusion that it was, and I, in turn, would be exposed for the sad, paralyzed, directionless man that I was, rapidly burning through the overabundance of good will, praise, and opportunity that had so undeservedly been heaped on him his entire life. And then at last, I would wake up one day in the not-so-distant future: a sad, quiet, comprehensively unaccomplished man; a man unremarkable in every respect, except in his failures, which would be numerous and varied; a man who has not much of anything to say except for one defensive and overly rehearsed screed about that time when he was younger and he thought he’d write something about some famous person, but he never quite got around to it.

But then I got the email from Kim’s team, and I felt silly for having ever doubted myself. Everything was unfolding exactly as it was meant to; everything was unfolding exactly as I always knew it would.

My editor at Vanity Fair jumped at the chance to publish this piece and is eager to get it out in time to coincide with Kim’s fortieth birthday — and, as it happens, the one year anniversary of the Incident —  six months from now. It’s a lot of time — certainly much more than I’ve ever been afforded in the past. And I’ve been given near complete authority to dictate and define the parameters of the piece.

But now that I’m here, it occurs to me that to truly understand and unravel everything that has happened is going to be an undertaking of an unprecedented scope and scale. 

Six months to explain where we’ve been. Six months to explain where we are. Six months to explain where we’re going. Six months to explain Kimberly Noel Kardashian West. 

***

The year preceding the Incident had been an especially momentous one for Kim — one that seemed to represent an inflection point of sorts. In so many ways, she seemed to be inaugurating a new phase of life, and perhaps more pointedly, a new identity for herself that would allow her to decisively shed the taint of her early notoriety that still lingered, even all these years later. After more than a decade of toiling away in the gutter of fame, Kim had managed to pull herself and her entire family up to a level of success so astonishing and unprecedented that it commanded essentially universal respect. Even those inclined to think the worst of the family found themselves couching their critiques in a grudging admiration, that is, when they bothered to criticize them at all, which was increasingly rarely, really, almost never. By the beginning of 2019, Kim Kardashian was arguably the most consequential celebrity on the planet, and one who was not only welcomed, but embraced in all quarters.

Of course she was still engaging in the same sort of behaviours that was best known for and that had arguably sustained her fame: the aggressive veneration of materialistic excess, the eager shilling of just about any product designed to foment self-loathing in its users, the utterly shameless nudity — as frequent as it was gratuitous…and yet somehow, it was no longer these things that people were talking about most of all. Rather, it was the other more respectable parts of her life and persona that were gradually assuming the bulk of the public narrative around her: little by little, and then, it seemed, all at once, she was becoming known less and less as a frequently nude hawker of mid-range cosmetics and laxative gummy candies, and more and more as an entrepreneur, a philanthropist, a tastemaker, a patron of the arts, a formidable legal mind, and as an advocate for causes and people that, shockingly enough, actually mattered. 

Suddenly, the very same designers who, only four or five years ago, had not only sworn that they would never dress her but had actively forbidden stylists from independently pulling their garments for her were throwing open their archives and lavishing gifts upon even the most bottom-feeding members of her entourage, desperate for even the most tangential of associations with her;

Suddenly, the very same politicians who, only four or five years ago — if they had even deigned to publicly admit that they knew who she was — would have only ever referenced her disgustedly as part of a clunky anecdote dreamed up by their communications officer in a bid to appear more relevant to millennial voters, now flocked to her, seeking her endorsement and counsel on the most pressing matters of state;

Suddenly, the very same titans of tech who, only four or five years ago, would have studiously avoided all mention of her successful embrace of their platforms lest they risk revealing their products to be the tawdry, venal, profit-driven, lowest common denominator opiates-for-the-masses that they are were now tripping over themselves to invite her to conferences, summits, and retreats, eager to analyze, dissect, and then formalize the immensely profitable business models that she had quite instinctually stumbled into. 

Suddenly, Kim Kardashian — discounted, maligned, scoffed-at, literal butt-of-the-joke Kim Kardashian — had done the most shocking thing of all: she had become respectable. 

For a moment, it really seemed like she, and by extension all of us, could have it both ways. For a moment, it really seemed like the rapacious accumulation of fame and the money could be undertaken with abandon then those spoils could be seamlessly deployed towards projects of greater personal fulfillment and the greater good. For a moment it really seemed that goodness could coexist with hedonism, that self regard could live alongside selflessness, that somehow, we could all wake up from our collective stupefaction to live purposeful, engaged lives. That all of our vanity, and preening, and idleness would not only have no consequences, but that in fact, it would be revealed to be a wholly necessary step along the road to individual self-actualization and collective enlightenment. 

But then that all went up in flames. 

***

There’s an air of efficiency, cooperation, even camaraderie to the way that everyone is going about their business.. been a there’s been absolutely no sense that this is anything other than a business-as-usual day on set. 

“Keeping Up With the Kardashians” is the rare pop culture artifact that originated in the pre-social media era that has not only endured, but thrived in this new media landscape — even arguably informing the tropes and norms of the medium that we now all take for granted: 

The low-grade but persistent terror that bubbles up in even the momentary absence of approval, stimulation, and validation; 

The gradual but encompassing evacuation of interior life that comes along with the awareness of having — no matter what the scale — an audience to pander to and please;

The inability to exist fully in the present, stalked by the terrorizing impulse to document, record, or otherwise render every moment of your life as consumable content;

The relentless need to distinguish yourself with ever-more novel experiences and expressions, only to discover that someone else has already done that, said that, wore that, felt that, experienced that — but first, and better; 

The delirious surge of dopamine — a fine substitute for actual happiness — provided by the attention of relative or even complete strangers who only care about you for the few fleeting seconds that the manufactured record of someone else’s life is capable of making them feel more of whatever it is they want to feel about themselves.

All of these impulses find their antecedent in the tropes of reality television, which, in spite of its built-in artifice, is arguably the truest expression of human nature that has ever been known. The great proliferation of social media over the past decade has, in a sense, rendered us all reality stars in the drama of our own lives; Kim paved the way, and we are all now, in a sense, just struggling to Keep Up.

If the twenty seasons of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” has proved anything, it’s that the banal daily goings-on of absolutely anyone can be massaged into wildly compelling content with shockingly little effort. And while it was hardly the first, and certainly not the best example of the then-nascent genre when it premiered in 2007, “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” has slowly but steadily been honed, buffed, and spit-shined to a gleaming perfection: an absolute and undeniable apotheosis of the form.

Of course over time, as its its tropes have been absorbed by the culture-at-large, and as its lessons have been propagated and advanced by new generations of fame-seekers, its impact has seemed to lessen somewhat. Though the high water mark for its ratings came sometime around 2012 — not coincidentally an early inflection point in social media adoption — it’s one of those shows that no longer commands a particularly large or devoted audience, but that would nonetheless be highly conspicuous in its absence. It has, in short, become an institution.

But after the Incident, like almost everything else in Kim’s world, and indeed, in the world at large, its fate was very much unknown. So when it was announced that “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” would be returning for a twenty-first season after all, the anticipation was greater than ever; so great, in fact, that if you were inclined to presume the absolute worst of Kim and her family, you might question whether their absence from the spotlight was in fact a highly strategic manoeuver designed to gin up their ever-so-slightly sagging fame through a winning combination of sympathy and morbid fascination? And if you were inclined to presume something even worse than the absolute worst of Kim and her family, you might wonder if the Incident were not, in fact, something that had been elaborately planned out in advance as a sort of grotesque ploy for continued relevancy in the face of an increasingly fractured and unwieldy media landscape where Kim and her sisters, tip-toeing into middle age, risked imminent obsolescence. And if you were indeed so inclined, and you followed that line of thought to its logical conclusion, what then would they be guilty of? What transgressions, and indeed, what actual crimes would they have committed, all in the name of a few more months or a few more years of continued relevancy? And what of the rest of us? Leering with morbid fascination, scarcely even able to utter the most rote words of sympathy or compassion as we lap up the delirious orgy of suffering as we would other form of disposable entertainment, wondering how soon is too soon to begin to openly speak about the whole ordeal with our usual airs of irony and indirection? Would we not all be guilty of combusting our last shreds of decency and consigning our last vestiges humanity all in the name of…what? Entertainment? Distraction? Nihilism?

It’s almost too terrible to contemplate, much less say out loud. 

Suffice it to say, the twenty-first season of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” has not gone according to plan. And yet, sitting here now, on the first day of filming, taking in the scene around me, everything seems shockingly normal. The atmosphere has been The camaraderie among the crew is palpable: easy, relaxed, respectful, cooperative — even joyful. If I didn’t know better, and if it didn’t seem so impossible given the circumstances, I would almost say that everyone seems happy to be here. 

Everyone, that is, except for Kim.

***

The energy of the room has returned to normal now. Everyone seems calm, focused, and efficient. The crisis, in other words, seems to be over.

I take advantage of the relative lull to make my way over to Kim and observe her more closely. I debate whether or not to introduce myself, formally and in person. I decide against it: somehow, I don’t feel like this moment is the right one. I want to catch her when she’s more her usual self: open, unguarded, optimistic, resilient. As it is, he’s just sitting there, staring off at nothing-in-particular. All the passion and fury and rage and potency on display just moments before seems to have dissipated completely. All I see now is a frail, slight shell of a person. Emotionally, speaking. Physically, she looks phenomenal.

There is absolutely no trace of the past year in Kim’s appearance or bearing: she’s limpid, silky, dewy and an infinity of other descriptors, none of which will ever fully capture just how sensational she looks. If one were to judge by her limpid, unlined face, one would be left with the impression of someone who exists in a world unburdened by the passage of time, or bodily functions, or pores. I feel even more ruddy, lumpy, and otherwise malformed than usual. All of the admittedly minor flaws that I had either stopped noticing or caring about, or had never noticed or cared about are suddenly all I can think about. I’m hyper aware of the flush of redness that mars my forehead, and the uneven texture dimpling my cheeks — more noticeable than usual in the bright, even light of Kim’s pristine kitchen. I can almost feel the lines around my mouth furrowing into the inevitable jowls, and the skin under my eyes, always tender and prone to inflammation seems, in an instant, to slacken and grey, making the low-grade existential exhaustion that has stalked me for for years finally and inevitably writ large across my face. 

As I draw nearer, near enough to see all the tiny flaws that would otherwise be concealed, smoothed over, buffed, polished and airbrushed away as a matter of course, I realise that she has no such flaws. Not even the slightest slackening of the skin around the jawline; not even the faintest creases stretching across her forehead; not even a single patch of redness, irritation, or dry skin; not a blemish, or a bump, or an enlarged pore, or even any pores at all. She’s radiant; she’s incandescent; she’s perfect.

Every part of her is soft, supple, milky, and silky. She’s practically ripe to the touch. And I do want to touch her. Strangely, inexplicably, more than anything right now, what I want is to reach out and touch Kim Kardashian. But of course I don’t; of course I can’t.

And really, I don’t know what I was expecting she would look like; I don’t think I actually believed that she would allow the stresses and strains to mar her appearance, or that there would ever be any circumstances that could ever meaningfully diminish her bounty of genetic good fortune. I’m not proud to admit it, but I suppose there is a part of me that wanted, and perhaps even needed, Kim’s alleged unraveling to be true. After all, how could anyone emerge intact from an experience like the past eight months? At a certain point, given everything she had endured, the rumours of her decline seemed not only plausible, but inevitable. And what scant evidence we did have of her state seemed to confirm the worst of all possible scenarios: the bloated-looking blanket-covered figure wending her way through a gauntlet of paparazzi outside the plastic surgeon’s office; the grainy drone footage of a bedraggled figure walking the perimeter of Kim’s backyard eating from what some particularly enterprising Redditors had eventually deduced was a family-size bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos; the reports from the employees of a nearby Hidden Hills McDonalds drive-thru, all of whom reported serving the same woman night after night, who, though sallow, turgid, and disheveled, bore an uncanny resemblance to you-know-who.

And yet, looking at her now, she conforms entirely to the glossy, gauzy vision of her that has been endlessly promulgated across every medium for the past decade-and-a-half, seared into some liminal place in my — and everyone’s — consciousness. 

But her eyes: her eyes betray her in an instant. They’re beyond mere sadness: to look into her eyes is to catch a glimpse of the broken, arrested, traumatised person who lives within this exquisitely manicured vessel, buffed and polished to a gleaming perfection so dazzling that no one, not even those closest to her — not even her own family — will realise that what they’re seeing is no longer an actual person, but rather the remains of an someone they used to know embalmed by fame forevermore. But other than that, she looks phenomenal. 

Sitting on either side of Kim are her two sisters, Kourtney and Khloé: both attractive — beautiful even — in their own right, though radically less striking than Kim. If Kim is somehow not quite of this world, Kourtney and Khloé both very much are: worked over, functional, practical renditions of beautiful people. 

I realise now that they’ve been there the whole time, but I’m only just seeing them now because they’ve been blocked from view by the vast conflagration of people who are there exclusively to support, maintain and uphold Kim. There’s little subtlety in Kim’s world.

Kourtney, Khloé, and Kim are the eldest siblings in the family. All three allegedly share the same father, the late Robert Kardashian. “Allegedly,” of course, is a necessary qualifier given the constant, low-level din of rumors about mixed paternity stemming from their mother Kris’ legendarily voluble and varied sexual appetite. And indeed, if you lend credence to even the smallest fraction of possible partners during the windows of their conception, the odds that all three share the same father are slim to the point of mathematical impossibility. 

Observing them all at close range now, together in one place, there is undeniably a familial resemblance. But it probably owes far less to their shared genetic material than to the surgically-abetted proliferation of Kim’s exceedingly pleasing natural features throughout the family. 

Kourtney is the eldest in the family, now in her early forties. She’s a handsome woman: more taut, toned, and petite than Kim: well-formed but far less shapely. but there’s a palpable sadness about her that makes her neither deserving of pity or worthy of contempt, so much as it permits her to recede into the background and become a virtual non-entity even in the punishing glare of fame. “Oh! There’s Kourtney! She looks great!” you might say, before your attention was diverted to something — anything — else. You meant to ask her something about herself this time — really you did — but something came up. Something always comes up. But when you really stop and think about it, you don’t really know what you’d ask her anyways…what’s she into? What’s she up to? She probably just wants to be left alone, you decide, and that’s the last you’ll ever think about it or her. 

Rather admirably however, Kourtney has still been able to eke out an exceedingly comfortable existence by feasting on the shop floor sweepings of her other sisters’ greater fame; passively reaping all of the more delightful benefits of this kind of life while still remaining functionally, essentially anonymous. Not that she hasn’t made repeated attempts (or more to the point, repeated attempts have been made on her behalf) to lend definition to and retroactively create justification for her fame: a series of highly polished initiatives have been launched over the years in an effort to establish her as an all-purpose lifestyle guru. And while by all objective measures, these efforts should have succeeded, the results have always been a curiously passionless and haphazard admixture of faddish parenting trends, restrictive dietary regimes, fitness, hashtag feminism, mental health advocacy, eco-tourism, sustainability, mid-century modern design, and a perhaps unintentional advocacy for a naturist lifestyle. These endeavours have all been theoretically well conceived, handily clear the minimum threshold of acceptability, and are superficially quite polished and appealing, but much like Kourtney herself, they simply have no real reason for existing, and so, one after the next after the next, they have been quickly forgotten and easily dismissed.

If Kourtney could be said to have a problem — which, given the supreme ease and comfort and near-total lack of responsibility of her life, she really can’t be said to have — it would be that she simply hasn’t been endowed with the same innate impulses towards self-promotion and commodification that the rest of her family possess in such abundance. In any other family, in any other circumstances, in any other moment in history, what is now perceived as this deficit in her would have registered  instead as a surplus of virtue; in any other family, in any other circumstances, in other other moment in time she likely would have stood as a gleaming totem of decency, modesty, circumspection, sobriety and sensibility as an inferno of bottomless vanity, pathological self-regard, and deeply reckless attention-seeking behavior raged all around her; in any other family, in any other circumstances, in any other moment in history, Kourtney Mary Kardashian would have secured for herself a happy, modest, decent life, and not only would that be enough, it would have been all that she or anyone else would possibly aspire to. But in her family, and under these circumstance, and in our moment in history, all of these qualities have conspired to make her a case study in squandered opportunities and forfeited potential who would surely inspire more pointed contempt were she not so consistently forgettable and forgotten. 

Khloé, meanwhile has ended up with arguably the worst of all possible arrangements: less famous than Kim, less beautiful, less rich, but endlessly scrutinized, ridiculed, jeered at, and otherwise declared to be deserving of the manifold personal misfortunes that have befallen her, one, after the next, after the next — most especially in matters of the heart. The serial betrayals of her husbands and lovers would almost be predictable at this point were all of these men not so spectacularly inventive in devising new ways to publicly humiliate her with their chronic infidelities. Just when it seems that she has suffered every imaginable degradation, the next man will come along, promising redemption and salvation, yet delivering only more and greater shame. And while her suffering has earned her a certain amount of sympathy and good will in certain quarters, the overwhelming response to her misfortunes has been one of almost gleeful scorn: the formerly fat sister who, in reaching so far above her station, is in effect simply getting what she deserves.

If other members of the family have been able to slowly and meticulously craft their own personal brand, Khloé has had no such luxury. Her brand was decided for her many years ago: she is the Woman Scorned. And while she has been able to cannily capitalize on this trope, the awful truth is that the public’s attention — and by extension her continued relevancy and success — is fueled by her ongoing debasement, comeuppance, and shame.

Over the past several years, however, she’s aggressively submitted herself to a torturous regime of diet, exercise, surgical intervention and self-loathing that has sculpted her body and face into a reasonably good simulacra of the chiseled and taut aesthetic that prevails in her family; that all of her sisters were, at least to a greater extent than her, naturally blessed with. The results have been dramatic, but unfortunately have done little to stanch the cruelty, vitriol, and abuse directed her way. She might be verifiably hot now, but her transformation has stubbornly resisted the imposition of a victory narrative, and instead has remained mired in an air of desperation and rejection. The overwhelming reaction to Khloé, no matter what she does, is simply this: who does she think she is?

Kourtney and Khloé have been with Kim since the very beginning, back when they were all just Hollywood bottom feeders with absolutely nothing to lose; back when smartphones were non-existent, and social media was primordial, and shame was still a feeling that most people could positively identify and there existed a fairly broad consensus that it should be avoided. All the way back then. More so than anyone else in Kim’s orbit today, they serve as a link to that time: a constant reminder of who and what she used to be. To them, to an extent, Kim will always just be that underestimated 23 year-old girl who propped up a video camera on top of a hotel room bar fridge, got down on her hands and knees, took a deep breath, and did what she knew she had to do to change her life. They despise her for it. And yet, they owe absolutely everything to her, and to that one single moment. And they know that, and that awareness only makes them hate her all the more. Perhaps she hates them too; perhaps she’s merely irked by their near-total ingratitude; perhaps she feels protective of them and wants to do whatever she can to help them succeed. But more likely than not, she simply doesn’t think about them at all. 

***

Kim’s new smoothie is ready. 

“I’ll bring it to her” Nicole announces as she snatches it from Erik, then walks over to Kim with and sets the smoothie down in front of her. Kim examines the smoothie for a moment, then reaches for the straw and gives a few quick swirls. The smoothie is visibly more slack than the first one, and Kim seems, if not pleased exactly, then at least not expressly unhappy. She picks up the glass, raises the straw to her lips and takes a big, long sip. She pauses, then swallows, then pauses again. 

“Nicole.”

“Yah, Kim???”

“Are there bananas in this?”

“Ummmm….Erik?” Nicole inquires.

“Oh yeah…well, uh, the avocados weren’t ripe so…is that not okay?” Erick mumbles with the uncaring air of someone who will always coast by on a surplus of charm and privilege and sexual charisma. 

And Kim suddenly slams down the smoothie on the counter with enough force that the glass shatters, and several large globules of smoothie are sent careening through the air, one of which lands on Kim’s chest and swiftly dribbles down between her breasts.

“YOU GUYS!!! I’M LIKE FUH-REAKING OUTTTTTT” Kim wails. A female attendant swoops in and wordlessly dabs in and around Kim’s cleavage with fistfuls of paper towels. She repeats this process until she has extracted several sodden wads, then follows that up with an aggressive swab of the area in question with multiple wet naps. Apparently satisfied with her work, she silently retreats to wherever it was she was stationed before, and not a word is exchanged between them. It occurs to me that her entire role within Kim’s sphere may be this one eventuality, and I make a mental note to confirm that with someone else on staff who would know such things. Not that that would be in any way surprising; or that it would really matter at all.

“NICOLE! Did you give him the list???”

“Uh, the umm, the…uh…what list exactly?” 

“THE LIST! THE LIST? THE FUCKING LIST YOU AND I WROTE TOGETHER THAT SAYS “KIM DOESN”T FUCKING EAT BANANAS?????” THAT FUCKING LIST????”

“Oh, right, uh…I thought that was for, um Christine?”

“Christine? Christine??? Who the fuck’s ‘CHRISTINE???’”

“Umm, Christine-Christine? Your nutritionist??”

“Ummmmm, OKAY. Christine IS my nutritionist, you’re right Nicole! Congratulations on identifying ONE FUCKING THING correctly in your life! Fucking BRA-VO!!! But AS my nutritionist, Christine is ACTUALLY the person who ACTUALLY told me not to fucking eat bananas. That’s ACTUALLY her fucking job — which she’s ACTUALLY fucking doing correctly. YOUR ACTUAL fucking job is to ACTUALLY make a fucking memo SAYING that I ACTUALLY don’t fucking eat bananas and then ACTUALLY give that fucking memo to Erik: the person who ACTUALLY makes the fucking food that I ACTUALLY fucking put into my ACTUAL FUCKING MOUTH??? Like is that ACTUALLY FUCKING CLEAR ENOUGH for you??? Or do I need to like, make another ACTUAL fucking memo explaining how to WRITE A FUCKING MEMO and how to GIVE THAT FUCKING MEMO to the RIGHT FUCKING PERSON???”

Nicole just stares at her blankly for a few seconds before replying “Um, yah, I uh, yeah…I think I actually di—” but Kim cuts her off before she can finish:

“Erik, I’m so sorry, this is LITERALLY not your problem. This is like, ACTUALLY so embarrassing for me because it just like, reflects SO poorly on me when I’ve like, chosen to surround myself with like, LITERAL FUCKING MORONS and like, I’m wasting your time and your talent…Like, I basically just FUCKING CAN’T right now.”

“Okay, so here’s the email I sent to the whole team back in May, see?” Nicole interjects, holding out her phone and reading aloud:“Subject: KKW Bananas and Plantains ❌🍌🛑”…it’s dated May 16th…and ummm…yup! Erik and everyone seems to be copied on it right here…”

“OKAY NICOLE???? You need to like, JUST FUCKING STOP LIKE HONESTLY RIGHT THE FUCK NOW because I’m like FREAKING THE FUCK OUT!!! Do you SEE ME??? Do you SEE THIS??? This is ME FREAKING THE FUCK OUT. I’m SO FUCKING HUNGRY but there’s LITERALLY FUCKING NOTHING for me to eat and I just like, FUCKING CAN-NOT ANYMORE.”

Suddenly Khloé who’s been watching all of this very intently jumps into the fray:

Okay Kimberly: ACTUALLY? You’re like being the BIGGEST FUCKING BITCH OF LIFE right now.You need to like, CALM THE FUCK DOWN…you need to like, CHILL THE FUCK OUT…you need to just like, uhhhh…NOT BE A FUCKING TWAT??? K. Cool. Thanks!”

“UMMM, OKAY. Like, Khlo’? Like, Babe?? Like, ACTUALLY??? APPRECIATE IT but ALSO: you like, ACTUALLY don’t even want to cross me right now. I’m like, SO FUCKING OVER EVERYTHING.”

“Okay!!!! Whatever!!!! Damn, Gina…” Khloé replies, punctuating the sentiment with an array of aggressive snapping gestures that venture perilously into Kim’s personal space.

“Uhhhh, like JUST FYI? That’s like, ACTUALLY not even how you USE “Damn, Gina.” Like, at all. Just throwing that out there. Fucking dumb bitch.” Kim mumbles.

“What did you say, Kimberly? What did you ACTUALLY JUST SAY TO ME??? ACTUALLY??? You know what? ACTUALLY??? You can ACTUALLY fuck right off. “Damn, Gina” is like my literal fucking catch phrase of life; like I use it all the fucking time; like, I know how to fucking use “Damn, Gina” OKAY? Like FOR REAL, babe? You need to FUCKING CHECK YOUR-FUCKING-SELF right now.”

“Omigawd, like babe? You’re like, honestly SO FUCKING TRAGIC right now because like, um, a.) you’re wrong. And like, b.) that is LITERALLY not even your catch phrase, like AT ALL. Because like, SERIOUSLY? Martin Lawrence invented it, and like, and when we were kids and we would be watching TV, you’d get up in front of the set and be all like “Damn, Gina! Damn, Gina! Damn, Gina!” and we’d all pretend to laugh because we had basically had a family meeting without you where we were all like “well she’s fat and gross, but maybe she can at least be funny, so we should encourage that I guess???” But like, it actually wasn’t funny at all, and like, YOU weren’t actually funny at all, and like, Mom would always have to tell you to sit down because you were blocking like, LITERALLY the entire TV. And it was like, a big screen. Like, the biggest big screen.”

“Well, I, uh- bu-, it’s just like” Khloé sputters and stammers, as the one thing that had ever been truly hers slips away in an instant. 

“YEAH. That’s what I FUCKING thought.”

“Okay: Kimberly? Kimberly?? Kimberly??? Like SERIOUSLY??? I just like… I was just….ALL I was FUCKING SAYING was that when people HEAR “Damn, Gina” they like, SOMETIMES ALSO think of ME…like…it’s a thing. Like, fucking look it up.”

“OMIGAWD Khlo’? Like, LITERALLY babe? You’re like, DELUSIONAL right now because like, ACTUALLY no one thinks about you like, HONESTLY EVER. Because like, no one wants to think about a fat, dumb, and like, BORING WHORE. Like OBVIOUSLY NOT.”

Suddenly, Kourtney rushes over and sandwiches herself between her two sisters, partially to defuse the tensions, but mostly to get them to notice her; to get anyone to notice her, really. “You Guys! You Guys!! You Guys!!! Do Me! Do Me!! Do Me!!!! I’m like SUCH a dumb slut, right Kim???” And like, don’t you just HATE what a stupid whore I am Khloé???”

“Honestly, Kourt, you need to just like, stay out of this, okay?” Kim replies.

“Yah babe; like, this is seriously not your battle…” Khloé chimes in.

“Okay; yah. I mean, like, whatever, it’s cool; I’ll just like, let you guys work it out and catch up with you later I guess…” Kourtney mutters as she stares down at her pigeon-toed stance. In this moment, she looks so small, so innocent, so childlike…almost like a little girl who, even by the age of six, has already been trained by her toxically vain and image-obsessed mother to subordinate herself to her younger, prettier sister to the point of near-total erasure. Almost just like that.

But neither Kim and Khloé acknowledge her any more. They’ve retreated to opposite corners of the kitchen island, and now are both stroking the tips of their hair extensions in furious, deliberative silence.

“Whore.” Khloé finally mutters, vaguely in Kim’s direction as she stomps off out of the kitchen.

“Yah. You’d fucking know…” Kim mumbles in return. And even though it doesn’t really make the kind of point that I think Kim was hoping to make, it does feel final, and I’m left with the sense that Kim was the decisive victor in this argument, both in rhetorical and stylistic terms.

Kim then turns to the room and shouts to everyone: “GUYS I’m sorry: we’re done. I’m done. Wrap it up. I’m out.”

A producer who looks like she’d be named “Pam” rushed over to Kim. “Kim; maybe we should just take like, twenty and regroup? We can all just take a breather and like, you know, get the smoothie situation sorted out…”

“I DON’T FUCKING WANT A FUCKING SMOOTHIE ANYMORE!!!! I wanted a FUCKING SMOOTHIE like a million FUCKING hours ago when I FUCKING asked for one the first time!!!!! All I FUCKING WANT NOW is for everyone to GET THE FUCK OUT of my FUCKING house so I can BE THE FUCK ALONE!!!” Kim screams.

“Okayyyy…I hear that…I do…” Pam replies with a particular sort of impassivity that can only come with decades of mortgaging every last one of your principles. 

“…and like, I’m not going to fight you on that Kim: it’s your show, it’s your house…buttttt…we DO need to shoot something…like we can make up your scenes tomorrow, maybe even get some confessional later on once you’ve had a chance to regroup, but we can’t just leave today with nothing, you know? That’d put us, like, days, honestly even weeks behind schedule….?”

Kim just sighs. “Fine. Fuck. Stay. Do whatever you want. Honestly?  I don’t even care anymore. Like, get some fucking B-roll of Kourtney’s asshole for all I care. Like…I’m fucking out.” 

And with that, she storms off.  

“Umm…so…are we like, gonna do that then?” Kourtney whispers to Pam as she starts to unbutton her pants.

But Pam just huffs out of the kitchen — probably to go have a cigarette; even though she probably quit four years ago; even though it’s probably killing her. 

“Wow. Yikes! That was…intense…” I offer to Nicole, trying to offer a tepid solidarity in the hopes of soliciting some caustic denunciation of her boss that I can weave into some larger narrative. 

“You know what? She’s actually had like, a REALLY tough year and like, you don’t even know what you’re walking into, so like, maybe you should just have like, a little bit of compassion or whatever???” Nicole snaps in defense of her boss.

“Oh, right, uh sure, I uh jus—”

“COULD SOMEONE GET ME SOME FUCKING BEIGNETS????” Kim shrieks from upstairs, instantly sending another ripple of panic coursing through the room.

“Uh Erik???…” Nicole passive aggressively needles after a few seconds have passed. “…the beignets???”

“Oh uh, yah…sure. Did she ask for them earlier? Or…” and Erik trails off, returning and re-upping Nicole’s passive aggression with his lingering question.

“Umm, just like, ASAP would be GREAT I think?.”

“Coooool…It’s just, uh…gonna take…like, a while?”

“Mmm. Yah. Totally. But it’s just like, Kim needs them liiiiiike, basically now, so just like, whatever you can do to just make it like super quick or whatever would be amaz—”

“NICOLE!!!!!!” 

And at the sound of Kim’s voice, Nicole immediately leaps up and dashes out of the kitchen, and no one’s sad to see her go. 

“Soooo, I was thinking maybe I could just sort of lean over the counter like this?” Kourtney interjects, to no one in particular. Now fully nude from the waist down, she’s clutching at the edges of the kitchen island and thrusting her rear out, presenting to the bank of now-dormant cameras and otherwise-engaged crew just beyond.

“Or maybe I could just like, bend over like this…” and she folds herself in half, grabs onto her ankles to steady herself, and peers out at the inverted and uncaring world beyond. I briefly make eye contact with her like this, but my gaze is inevitably drawn to other things. 

“Or like, I could just do this…” and she gets down onto all fours, assumes a wide stance, then flattens her face to the marble floor. Just then, a single droplet of Kim’s shattered smoothie that had been clinging to the underside of the countertop edge releases and splatters, almost gleefully, on the top of her head.

“Is this good you guys?”

“Will this work you guys?

“Are you guys getting the shot?

“You guys?”

“You guys??”

“You guys???”

But no one seems notice, or care, or even hear her at all. All anyone can hear now is the high, whirring drone of the commercial-grade stand mixer that’s blending together a large batch of batter for Kim’s beignets. They’ll be ready soon, but not soon enough. ⧫