When Kim Kardashian and Kanye West officially started dating in the spring of 2012, after they’d been circling each other for nearly ten years, Kim was still mostly reality-show famous. She was hawking QuickTrim diet pills — the company settled a class-action lawsuit that year for $5 million. Endorsement-wise, she had risen no higher than being the face of Midori, the (neon green, melon flavored) liqueur that hadn’t been popular since the 1980s. Kanye, on the other hand, was the ultimate cultural alchemist — at the apogee of contemporary multidisciplinary success. In 2011, he headlined Coachella (in a blouse from Celine); he made his official debut as a designer, premiering his DW by Kanye West collection during Paris Fashion Week; and he commissioned Givenchy’s creative director, Riccardo Tisci, to design the cover art for ‘Watch the Throne.’ From his perch as the arbiter of cool, Kanye was captivated by Kim. “I realize that he loves, like, a project, right?” she told writer Jonathan Van Meter. “I think he really fell in love with the idea of me, and the project behind it all. He loves things that maybe aren’t cool and ‘I’m going to make them cool.’ Whether it’s, like, ‘I’m going to stop rapping and do a whole singing album, like 808s.’ And everyone’s like, ‘How could you not rap? It’s blasphemy!’ And then it’s the best album. I think he’s like, ‘Let me be with a reality star. No one respects it. I’m going to show you how cool it is.’ He changed my life. He *absolutely* changed my life.” She leveled Van Meter with a look that he knew well; by then, he had spent seven years with Kim, having first met her in 2019 and started interviewing her about her life two years later. “Listen,” she said. “It’s a huge part of my story.” In an excerpt from his upcoming book, ‘Citizen Kim,’ Van Meter writes about how Kim’s three marriages — Damon Thomas, Kris Humphries, and Kanye — shaped her into who she is today: nymag.visitlink.me/zrbmZU