Kim Kardashian is looking back on her marriage to Ye with unmistakable warmth, crediting the rapper with transforming her life in a newly published book excerpt. The SKIMS founder sat for hours of interviews with writer Jonathan Van Meter for the forthcoming biography “Citizen Kim: The Woman Who Created the Future,” and The Cut published a chapter covering her three marriages on October 13.
Speaking about the early years with Ye, formerly Kanye West, Kardashian described a period she still treasures. “That time in my life was so, so much fun. And so special. It was, like, the normal years, the calm before the storm. I was just experimenting and finding myself,” she told The Cut.
The quotes resurfaced this week after the NFR Podcast account shared them on X, where the clip has drawn more than 23,000 likes. In the excerpt, Kardashian also offered a striking read on what drew her ex-husband to her in the first place.
“I realize that he loves, like, a project, right? I think he really fell in love with the idea of me, and the project behind it all,” she said, according to Reality Tea. “He loves things that maybe aren’t cool and ‘I’m going to make them cool.'” Her conclusion was blunt: “He changed my life. He absolutely changed my life.”
The makeover started early in the relationship. Kardashian recalled Ye asking her, “Can I give you a fashion makeover?” before a team of stylists descended on her first house on Abington Avenue while she confidently assumed she already “had it all.” The reset reshaped her public image into the fashion-world fixture she became, Yahoo Entertainment noted.
The marriage still cracked under pressures she documented on camera. In a clip from “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” cited in the excerpt, a sobbing Kardashian told her sisters, “I just honestly can’t do this anymore,” calling herself a failure in her third marriage and refusing to relocate to Wyoming while her family stayed in Hidden Hills.
The couple married in 2014 and Kardashian filed for divorce in 2021, with Hypefresh’s coverage of the settlement that set Ye’s child support payments at a reported $200,000 per month following the final split. They share four children, North, Saint, Chicago and Psalm.
The years since have been anything but calm. Hypefresh reported on Kardashian opening up about co-parenting struggles and months without contact from Ye, and she later revealed the toll the divorce period took on her health, with Hypefresh covering her brain aneurysm diagnosis disclosure amid the stressful split.
Ye has offered his own retelling of their history, including his claim that he never planned to have children with Kardashian, a statement that sat awkwardly beside the family they built. Elle’s rundown of her full dating history traces the arc from her first marriage to music producer Damon Thomas in 2000 through the relationship that changed everything.
“Citizen Kim” does not yet have a publication date attached to the excerpt, but the passages published this week make one thing clear: whatever the storm cost her, Kardashian remembers the calm before it fondly.
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