NEED TO KNOW
- Socialite Karen Shiboleth, who is close with Tiffany Trump, is shopping a memoir about her privileged life growing up on the Upper East Side in the aughts
- She says the wild stories make Gossip Girl pale in comparison
- She also says there is plenty of self-reflection and heartbreak in the pages, but that it’s also funny and she doesn’t take herself “too seriously”
Karen Shiboleth, a London-based socialite and writer who grew up in the wilds of the Upper East Side in the early 2000s, is shopping her memoir, Don’t Threaten Me With A Good Time that she describes as “Gossip Girl meets Cat Marnell’s How to Murder Your Life” — except she notes that her story makes Gossip Girl look positively vanilla in comparison.
“I’m calling it a coming-of-age story — just an unlikely one,” Shiboleth, 32, tells PEOPLE with a laugh.
The author, who left Manhattan to study law in London in 2016, says she has a story to tell that goes far deeper than recounting the antics of her well-documented NYC-crew of young socialites dubbed the “Snap Pack,” or occasionally, the “Rich Kids of Instagram.”
The group included pals like Peter Brant, Gaia Matisse, Kyra Kennedy (RFK’s daughter) and Tiffany Trump. Sometimes they’d end up in the pages of the NY Post for posting about their active night lives on social media before it was a thing.
“I’m not blowing the whistle on my friends, but they’re in the book, even if they aren’t all named,” she says of her pals. “My stories are their stories.”
Shiboleth is highly aware that she grew up in a rarefied world — and she doesn’t hide that in the memoir. In fact, she leans into it, which he thinks might humanize caricatures in the media. She aims to do that by getting very raw about some of her most personal struggles.
Born to two incredibly successful and self-made parents (her father, Amnon Shiboleth, is the head of a successful law firm out of Tel Aviv, and her mother, Lynn Krominga, was general counsel for Revlon until the early 2000s), and her childhood was a tightly scheduled routine that featured weekends in the Hamptons, tennis and piano lessons, and attending the private Heschel School.
“I was always the youngest in the room,” Shiboelth says about being surrounded by nannies and other adults in her younger years. “It wasn’t lonely, exactly — I was just expected to be an adult. My life was very regimented, and on weekends I would go with my parents to vineyards … browsing at antique stores for hours was nearly the death of me.”
In her book, she writes about how her life changed dramatically at 14 when she became hellbent on rebelling against her good-girl upbringing.
“I got into Columbia Prep for high school, and had this urge to go for it,” she says.
She fell in with a bunch of wild older girls and began sneaking into clubs, picked up a smoking habit and partied her way through Manhattan establishments by the time she was 16; birthday parties at 1Oak, Avenue or the Thompson Hotel, all documented religiously in Facebook albums at the time.
“I definitely feel nostalgia for the pre-iPhone era. I remember walking into TenJune one night and Kanye spontaneously started DJing. I saw major artists come up in their careers when things were less performative, which I think is just a small but special insight that feels inspiring. How many people can say they saw Lady Gaga open for New Kids on the Block, or had a rapport with the Chainsmokers when they were resident DJs at a small venue? It was just a different time to be a teenager,” she says.
After studying at Columbia University, she felt the need to make a life change and went to London to study law.
“It dawned on me that I could wake up one day, 50 years old, and be doing the same thing if I never left New York City,” she says, adding, “It’s a place people dream about moving to. Leaving is just not something anyone considers — including me. I told myself I’d be back in a year.”
It’s now coming up on a decade since she’s settled in the U.K., during which time she met and married husband and MUBI film exec, Rory Japp. After law school, she wound up getting a job at an intelligence agency, which she says she will divulge in her book.
“I know how insane it sounds,” of going from “Rich Kid of Instagram” to a career in corporate espionage.
Things got even wilder afterward. After the intelligence firm, she got a job with a big-shot art dealer in London who hired her to help launch an offshoot of his prestigious gallery in Miami — she had no idea that the entire operation was a giant art-world Ponzi scheme that funded famous art scammer Inigo Philbrick’s elaborate lifestyle.
“The irony of leaving my job as an intelligence operative only to be so blatantly duped isn’t lost on me,” she laughs. (She quit the job before Philbrick’s arrest.)
The book also tells of several close friends she’s lost to opioid addiction along the way, among other heartbreaks she feels impacted the course of her life.
“I’ve been through a lot of crazy sh—! I have these wild stories that are entertaining,” she says of why she wrote the book. “Those make for great stories and are fun to re-live. The sad stories are more relatable and the ones that matter most because they force you to decide who you want to be.”
She adds, “Everyone goes through things that test them. No amount of money or power can buy protection from pain and suffering. While there’s a lot of honest self-reflection, it’s meant to be sarcastic and funny. I’m excited to let people know the real me — and to discover that I don’t take myself all that seriously.”
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