“Kris Jenner and all things Kardashian” details Kris’s Jenner’s biography and stepping stones to creating the media frenzy currently enjoyed by this family. Kris herself came from a modest family background, her grandmother ran a candle store, and her father left them when she was little. Kris the teenager has a romance with a professional golfer, and gradually gets introduced to Robert Kardashian, a family-oriented lawyer of Armenian descent who fell head over heels for her. Kris doesn’t feel the same way, and spends a long time brushing him off. By their third meeting he proposes marriage, but Kris isn’t interested. She’s engaged to someone else—even though by this point, she doesn’t love him either. Eventually, Kris breaks off her engagement (she’s still really young, and working as a stewardess at the time) and marries Robert Kardashian. Wealthy Kardashian leaves in the swanky Beverly Hills and introduces Kris to a life she did not know before. They start a family. Which is where the foundation of the story begins.
There’s a lot touched upon this book—Kris’s infidelity to Robert with a young twenty something, the disintegration of their marriage and Kris’s re-marriage to Olympic champion Bruce Jenner, their friendship with Nicole Brown and O.J. Simpson, Robert Kardashian’s inclusion in the legal defense team of O.J. Simpson, as well as the family’s accidental foray into reality-television which created a brand for them out-of-thin air.
Even if you’re not a fan of the limelight surrounding the Kardashians, and frankly I never watched their show, this book is an interesting look at Kris, a business-savvy woman who uses what she has to become incredibly rich. While many stop at simply marrying rich, Kris goes one step further. She acts as a manager for her own daughters, and at one point describes resurrecting Bruce Jenner’s career as a public speaker by creating media kits for him. After her family becomes famous because of the reality shows, she talks about supplementing the income with a nutritional supplement business, skin care line, clothing line, spin-off shows, etc. At one point, she writes “How can I take these fifteen minutes of fame and turn them into thirty? How can I get paid to do what I love?” And perhaps this is the main lesson of the book.