Kim Kardashian West's Selfish, Reviewed: Every single thing Kim K.

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Once there was a woman who documented everything that happened to her. Banalities — meals eaten and paths taken; scandals — the men she seduced, the powerful people she destroyed; but above all, there was every thing, no detail too small and no feeling too petty. Outfits, friendships, wealth, pets — a woman’s life catalogued in lists that ranked life as more and most, better and best.

I’m referring, of course, to Sei Shōnagon, the 10th-century lady of the court who served the empress Sadako during Japan’s Heian period. She wrote lists (“Infuriating Things” was one, “Things That Give You Pleasure” another), and made bold declarations (“A priest who gives a sermon should be handsome”). She was cruel and funny, superficial and poetic, and everything we know about her life comes directly from her; everything else, up to and including her real name, is debate fodder for historians. The only true thing that remains is her memoir, The Pillow Book.

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I thought of Shōnagon as I held my small but heavy copy of

, a beautiful book released by the art book publishers Rizzoli. The 448-page book is a collection of selfies, casual self-portraits usually taken with a smartphone, between the years of 2006 and 2014. The author — or photographer, or curator, depending on your predilection towards the selfie’s artistic merit — is a woman named Kim Kardashian West, and you probably already know who she is. Future generations will know, like we know Shōnagon, who she is. And the images collected in

will be a crucial part of how we know and understand Kardashian West as a person, a public figure, and a global phenomenon.

The title is bait — a clever play on the term, of course, and an indictment of detractors who consider the selfie a sign of the burgeoning social media apocalypse; the pool Narcissus drowned in replaced by the bottomless depths of the front-facing smartphone camera. Some photos come with captions, either as comment or explanation: “We look so young here,” she writes of a 2007 photo with her friend, Jonathon, while a 2010 photo of her giving a thumbs-up is labelled, simply, “Helicopter ride in Miami.”

Kardashian West doesn’t waste any time on exposition with her book. She offers only a brief preamble and a table of contents (organized by year) before the selfies themselves. “[A]s I printed [the selfies] out and laid them on the floor to make a final edit,” she writes in the jacket copy, “I reflected on my very public journey as a daughter, sister, friend, wife, and mother.”

It has been quite the public journey, that’s true! Born Kimberly Noel Kardashian, the second child to Robert and Kris Kardashian, the Kardashian name was first introduced to the public via a tragic spectacle: Robert worked to defend Orenthal James Simpson on the charge of murdering his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. Indeed, one of the most infamous moments of the case — a high-speed car chase between the police and Simpson as news helicopters followed and filmed — began after Simpson left the Kardashian family home. He had been sleeping on their couch in the days following the murder. At the time, Kim Kardashian was 14 years old.

Do we still believe there is more to fame than fame itself?

Since then, the Kardashian household has remained a source of highly public drama — domesticated somewhat as the reality television show Keeping Up with the Kardashians, now entering its 10th season — although the route there was winding. Kardashian West grew up in the same social circles as the hotel heiress Paris Hilton, and was often photographed accompanying her at the height of Hilton’s fame. In 2007, a sex tape Kardashian West had made four years earlier, with her then-boyfriend, the rapper Ray J., leaked to the press. Kardashian West became the subject of her own media frenzy. The excess attention was harnessed and handled, until the entire family stepped into the spotlight as reality television stars.

Concurrently, Kardashian West indulged in the trappings of a modern-day mogul-in-the-making: she licensed her name to fragrances and fashions, made cameos in films, graced the covers of increasingly legitimate fashion and gossip magazines (on a scale from Us Weekly to Vogue), and released her popular game, Kim Kardashian Hollywood, which pulled in $43.4 million in revenue by the third quarter of 2014. In 2012, she began dating the musician Kanye West; the two had their daughter, North, in June 2013, and married the following spring.

The trajectory of Kim’s career — from daughter of a prominent lawyer to a tech, beauty and fashion tycoon with an estimated $65 million personal net worth — is one critics have often reduced to “nothing.” As in, “she’s famous for nothing.” The statement betrays its own logical inconsistencies: do we still believe there is more to fame than fame itself?

Kardashian West found her medium in the smallest screens — on televisions, of course, but primarily on smartphones, where her app was downloaded in record numbers and her Instagram photos are among the most viewed within the entire medium. A photo of her kissing West at their wedding got 1.95 million “likes” in three days, for example; a cover of the magazine

featuring a naked Kardashian West was headlined “Break The Internet.”

The small size of Selfish seems to reflect something about Kim’s particular brand of celebrity: size, as we normally consider it, does not matter. As a public figure, Kardashian West has made herself one of the only commodities on Earth with a value that increases the more available it becomes. Her worth is not about scarcity. It’s about access.

With Selfish, she provides a visual timeline of that access: we see how our technologies have evolved, of course, as the digital cameras become replaced by Blackberries and Androids, but the book also proves that more truly is more where Kardashian West is concerned. All of these images are available for free — as long as you can download the Instagram app on your phone you could pull them up — with a few notable exceptions. The centrefold of the book, pages printed black while the rest are white, are nude photographs originally sent to private recipients. Instagram has a policy of not allowing any nipples or similar lascivious body parts; Selfish has no such limitations. More is more: the volume of photos, yes, but also the access to Kardashian West, a chance to get closer without leaving a smaller, hand-held medium.

There are other perks to flipping through Kim Kardashian West’s selfies in book form, rather than scrolling through her feed; for one, there are no comments, a flood of racist, sexist vitriol peppered with get-rich-quick spam and the occasional defender trying to engage with a troll. The feed of images is marred by the ugly and unsolicited input of millions of onlookers. By contrast, the pristine quiet of the Rizzoli book is a welcome reprieve. Selfish is, like all books, a closed circuit. Here a picture mercifully silences thousands of words.

The only way a book can break the Internet — a site of such knowledge and stupidity, so much pleasure and even more pain — is by offering what Selfish does: a reflection, nothing more. Here Kardashian West makes eye contact only with herself, shows us only the images that made it past her final edit, the version of her appearance she wants us to see. A selfish assessment, perhaps, or at the very least a myopic one, but it is her reflection and it is her face — and the persistent, constant images of her face — that commands this attention and it is her choice and right to give our thumbs something to flip past, either on the page or on the screen.

The oft-cited art history text by John Berger, Ways of Seeing, considers the hypocrisies of images of nude and semi-nude women throughout history. “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure,” Berger writes, his exasperation lifting off the page. “The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.”

Kardashian West has done more than connive in treating herself as a sight: she’s made her image, and her vision, a source of power — her own reflection is an artifact of her prestige. Selfish will outlast the most popular apps, the magazines that become next month’s recycling, the chorus of voices clamouring for their own takes, and all that will remain is Kardashian West, again and again, everywhere all at once.

Shōnagon allegedly lived to rue the publication of The Pillow Book, saying she felt “regret that it ever came to life.” I doubt Kardashian West will feel the same way and for that I am, selfishly, grateful. I want to see it all.

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Haley Mlotek is the editor of The Hairpin, and a frequent contribute to these pages. Earlier this month, she was nominated for a National Magazine Award for personal journalism.