Paris Hilton Has a Lesson for Everybody
The Paris Hilton with whom I am familiar is not the real Paris Hilton, Paris Hilton tells me. The Paris Hilton she describes in her best-selling new memoir is. “I just put it all out there. It was like writing in a diary, speaking about things that I’ve never said out loud to anyone in my life, not my closest friends or family members. So I would say it was definitely me,” she tells me over Zoom. “Yeah, it’s me.”
I do not believe this claim for a minute, nor do I believe that she believes it either. Paris: The Memoir is a glimpse into the lifestyles of the rich and famous; a dishy gift for her devoted fans, the Little Hiltons; and a horrifying recounting of a life filled with exploitation and abuse. It is also a manual on how to construct a self for public consumption, a skill at which Hilton is an immortal genius and a practice she has helped mainstream into American culture, curving it into a ouroboros of ceaseless posting, commenting, buying, selling.
Who is Paris Hilton? A wife and mom. A sweet weirdo. A sincerely enthusiastic partier. An advocate who just got a. A DJ and model, at the helm of a media-and-merch empire. A progenitor of and contributor to so many cultural phenomena: “nepo babies,” the phrase , reality television, the Kardashian Cinematic Universe (Kim got her break on TV), influencing as a career.
