The Hidden Hills Estate

The most recent chapters are the ones nobody predicted. A co-starring role in American Horror Story: Delicate in 2024. A California bar admission she is still studying for, after passing the state's baby-bar law exam in December 2021 on her fourth attempt. Neither fits the story the public already holds about Kim Kardashian, which is where Elliot Cranmer's biography starts pulling.

Kimberly Noel Kardashian grew up in the Calabasas hills, the second of four children of the trial lawyer Robert Kardashian and the homemaker Kris Houghton Jenner, and went to Marymount High School in Bel Air. In her early twenties she organised closets for Brandy Norwood and Paris Hilton. A sex tape with her former boyfriend Ray J leaked in February 2007. Keeping Up with the Kardashians premiered on E! seven months later and ran twenty seasons, to June 2021.

Cranmer takes the marriages seriously without letting them carry the whole book: Damon Thomas in 2000, divorced in 2003; Kris Humphries in August 2011, divorced seventy-two days later; Kanye West in May 2014, divorced in March 2022, and the four children she has with him, North, Saint, Chicago and Psalm. Around those years he builds the business: the Paris Hilton apprenticeship, the Skims shapewear launch of September 2019, the $4 billion valuation the company carried by 2023. He gives full room to the criminal-justice-reform work and the four federal pardons she has secured, for Alice Marie Johnson, Crystal Munoz, Tynice Hall and David Barren. He also covers the O.J. Simpson defence-team Sundays of her childhood, the nine-month relationship with Pete Davidson in 2022, and the grind of the law studies that runs underneath the later years.

What emerges is a portrait of a Calabasas closet organiser who became the most photographed woman in the world, and of the reality-television and direct-to-consumer business her family spent twenty years building around her.