Life of M

by Rachel Cusk

From the critically acclaimed author of the Outline trilogy, an irresistible novel of fame, power, beauty, and truth―and a blazing renovation of the form.

The film star M is one of the most recognizable faces of our time. Her image is everywhere. It has been like that since she was a child.

With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. M may live in the same places as real people. She may meet her friends or collect her children from school or walk her dogs as they do. But it seems the rules of reality have melted away.

Now, a writer has decided to pay close attention to M’s life, in the hope of understanding who she really is. It is hard not to feel ugly next to M, hard not to feel insignificant. But what truths―about the very experience of living―might this proximity allow the writer to briefly capture? Is M to play a character in the book, or is it the writer who is acting the role of M?

In this astonishing, explosive novel, Rachel Cusk hunts for the nature of truth without ever swerving away into self-deceptions. She investigates who we are, and pretend to be, at this late stage of modern life when we are hypnotized, more and more effectively, by the images we see everywhere. She shows us that the real value of life might lie not in beauty but in ugliness; in having a self that has survived the violence of the world. Life of M is a beautiful piece of music, audible in a world of noise and spectacle.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Adult Fiction, British Literature, Novels, Canada

192 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication August 25, 2026

About the author

Rachel Cusk was born in Canada, and spent some of her childhood in Los Angeles, before her family returned to England, in 1974, when Cusk was 8 years old. She read English at New College, Oxford.

Cusk is the Whitbread Award–winning author of two memoirs, including The Last Supper, and seven novels, including Arlington Park, Saving Agnes, The Temporary, The Country Life, and The Lucky Ones.

She has won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes: her most recent novel, Outline (2014), was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmith's Prize and the Bailey's prize, and longlisted for Canada's Giller Prize. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'

She lives in Brighton, England.

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

The internet is buzzing with the rumour that main character M was inspired by Natalie Portman, and I can report that this is very obviously the case: For instance, the whole thing is set in Paris where Cusk and Portman live, and there are discussions of Black Swan, Vox Lux, several hints at Portman's break out role in Léon: The Professional, variations on her being a Dior Book Tote ambassador etc.pp. But this is not a hit piece, so in case Portman really feels betrayed by Cusk, that raises the question what she expected fom a Cusk novel inspired by her.

Identity has always been Cusk's major concern, her famous annihilated perspective doesn't rely on characters sharing their innermost thoughts, but depicts them through reflections by others and through what happens, which creates a mosaic of moving fragments (The Outline Trilogy: Outline, Transit and Kudos has it in the title, and it's not her most famous work for nothing). Second Place (2021) and Parade (2024) have dealt with creativity and being an artist, mainly pondering painting, sculpture and portraiture, but "Parade" also has a section ("The Spy") on a filmmaker who uses a pseudonym to not let his ego interfere with his art - in fact, the whole novel moved further into the direction of visual art, deconstructing the idea of having one protagonist and one coherently developing story arc.

So "The Life of M" is a logical progression: It shows an actress devoid of anonymity and questions what fame does to her construction of identity, because she lives in a world that constantly and relentlessly presents her with mirror images of her perceived persona, both as a celebrity (her playing the public "Natalie Portman" / M) and her playing roles - and we also get glimpses into her mind, to highlight the effects. Of course, there is no "real" Natalie Portman / M in the sense that she can grasp all dimensions of her being - no one can - but the perspective of a person in her position is annihilated to a completely different degree. The novel shows that and ponders how it messes with M - but the text does not criticize M for it, it just refuses to play into marketing ideas of relatability and authenticity: The fact that M, living with the distancing aura of fame since childhood, struggles with these concepts is rooted in her being human and living under extreme circumstances. There is a recurring shift to "we", and it might be the multitude of roles within M, but it might also be M and the narrator (who is also at least two different people: a painter and Cusk-esque writer), or M and all of us - the oscillation underlines questions of not only identity, but also belonging.

The novel is constructed as a flow of individual scenes that often prompt M to remember aspects of her life, and of course it's impossible to determine which parts are based on what Portman might have said to Cusk (the person who really looks bad here is Benjamin Millepied, btw). So on one hand, the novel does ponder individual presentation shaped by outside influence, but it also investigates self-presentation based on volition and beyond habitus - Cusk calls upon Louis' confessional autofiction Changer : Méthode to illustrate this. It should be clear though that this book is fiction, because there is so much that Cusk clearly adds by projection and by making points about the nature of identity. And fiction as art allows us, both readers and writers, to occupy someone else's identity as we imagine it to be.

And if you look at it like that, this is Schrödinger's novel: It's about Natalie Portman, and it's also not about Natalie Portman. It's the value of these discussions plus, of course, Cusk's pristine language that render this book worthwhile.

[esmereadsalot · Rating 5 out of 5]

cuskheads we are SO back

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was how people and things behaved around her. Reality became malleable, was always giving way and changing its rules. In a sense it was the same lawlessness as that of films, as though M were always in a film, even when she wasn’t. It seemed like the greatest good fortune, to have been removed from reality and its rules in this way.

The Life of M begins A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea. She’s a good sport. Would you just make it up? she said.

And the novel shifts fluidly between three narrative strands: the 'I' narrator telling stories about the famous M (where, we discover, the narrator takes the brief literally); parts written in the collective first person describing life in a modern city (unnamed but seems to be Paris) which is both prosperous and squalid at the same time (there is something of a preoccupation with public defecation by both humans and animals the people walking their dogs do not intend to make the streets smell unpleasant but do so nevertheless); and sections on the narrator's own life, in particular the illness of 'my partner' (always referred to as such, with pronouns assiduously avoided, perhaps setting up a rather odd last line).

One of a number of screenplays/films featured, some real (e.g. François Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Akira Kurosawa's Drunken Angel) and others imagined by Cusk:

On the desk in the office is a screenplay. It was written by a friend of hers and he hopes M will agree to star in it. It is about a famous actor who bears more than a little resemblance to M herself. Her repertoire, her history, her mannerisms and style are all recognisable as M’s own, with the horrifying difference that this actor is a sort of emotionless automaton, eviscerated by the globe-wide possession of her image. The being who lives in or behind this image is a vagrant soul struggling to gain purchase on the frictionless surfaces through which she moves, never encountering a boundary or border that would signify the limit of her identity. Severed from her own nature, she enacts her character as though it were a part she were playing whose lines, as soon as she has mastered them, invoke ever greater terrains of emptiness and silence. M does not know how to tell her friend that she is offended by his screenplay, which he has explained to her as a kind of game or conceit that would interrogate the notion of celebrity–and thus of self–in a new way. Without her participation, this conceit would fall flat. He evidently believes her to be capable of intellectualising her situation, and in a way she is, but something in the friend’s manner of transforming her into an object of artistic enquiry arouses in M a violent and almost inarticulate instinct of self-protection. He would doubtless be astonished to know this, given all the things from which, in his imagination, she has had to protect herself. He evidently sees her life as a chain of coercions that have loosened her hold on her own existence. He thinks he is dignifying her fundamental powerlessness. But in fact it is to this empty and passionless alter ego that she will never surrender.

Similarly works of art (the real including Francesca Woodman's photography) and created by Cusk:

The room contains numerous works of art, all of them contemporary. The most immediately striking, or simply unexpected, is a group of metal sun loungers taking up the corner of the room nearest the door. They stand in a row. Their adjustable backs are each set at a different position between flat and upright. The sun loungers are painted a bright and sinister yellow. On one of them a flimsy black-lace garment–perhaps an item of lingerie–has been casually draped. At the other end of the room, above the illuminated sideboard, hangs a colour photograph mounted on an aluminium panel. The photograph is very large, almost the size of the section of wall it occupies. It shows a child, a girl, standing in the ruins of a structure of some kind, a sort of hangar. Metal beams and uprights lie or lean here and there like fallen trees in a forest. The plastic sheeting that was the structure’s roof hangs down around her in great shredded flaps, letting in a cold white light. The floor is strewn with rubbish and broken glass. The girl is skinny and is dressed in a ragged sort of school uniform that is too small for her, a very short plaid skirt that shows her bare legs, a mis-buttoned white shirt from which her gawky arms protrude, a school tie that hangs askew.

The narrator's project unravels when she sees M as herself on television, having based her stories on M's movies, where she is clearly playing a character:

The process had felt like a surrender to my own ugliness. It was the same ugliness in proximity to M that I had noted at the beginning, the ugliness of experience. I had dealt with that ugliness in the past by trying to pay attention to myself. But it seemed that the project had caused me to lose the ability to do that. It was this abandonment of myself that had helped me. It had enabled me to leave and go and live in someone else. Using an actor had enabled me to relinquish my experience. One day I had happened to see a tennis match playing on a television screen. While I was watching the camera cut away from the players and showed the people sitting in the crowd. There was M, smiling and laughing in a straw hat in the VIP section. I wasn’t sure I could explain to her the unbearable strain this sight had imposed on me. It was as though my most private interior world had suddenly been cast out into the light. It was as though the being in which I was attempting to live was refusing to host me any more.

The Life of M feels an amalgam of the innovative Outline trilogy, with its unique annihilated perspective, and Cusk's subsequent novels, the brilliantly constructed Second Place and the ekphrastically excellent Parade. Here there is more focus on spaces (architecture but particularly interior design) and the nature of fame.

And I think this can be seen either as a culmination of the works before it, or something of a derivative, lesser work. I re-read it on completion but a re-read didn't add to my appreciation), so I lean towards the second interpretation, but this may be one to revisit at the time of publication, as Cusk's works often contain hidden depths. Star rating pending but between 3 and 4.

Postscript 1

A fascinating article in Unherd argues, convincingly, that M is inspired by Natalie Portman

https://unherd.com/2026/07/a-novelist...



Postscript 2

The opening section of Life of M originally appeared in the New Yorker as a short story. In the same edition, Cusk wrote an article on Muriel Spark's 1966 story The House of the Famous Poet, from which she took inspiration. She says:

"I took several things from the story: the atomizing nature of catastrophe, which yet grants a peculiar clarity of perception; the electric influence of fame; the haphazard quality of experience, which militates against narrative; and the unstructured possibilities of female association. The story culminates in the idea of an “abstract funeral”: I was intrigued and moved by this but couldn’t find a way of answering it in my own story, “Project.” I did, however, take two lines from the opening of “The House of the Famous Poet” and put them largely unaltered into my story—a genuflection to the master."

I struggled initially to find those lines - but it transpires these are from a section of the story that was then cut for the final novel.

Spark: In the summer of 1944, when it was nothing for trains from the provinces to be five or six hours late, I travelled to London on the night train from Edinburgh, which, at York, was already three hours late. There were ten people in the compartment, only two of whom I remember well, and for good reason.

I have the impression, looking back on it, of a row of people opposite me, dozing untidily with heads askew, and, as it often seems when we look at sleeping strangers, their features had assumed extra emphasis and individuality, sometimes disturbing to watch. It was as if they had rendered up their daytime talent for obliterating the outward traces of themselves in exchange for mental obliteration. In this way, they resembled a twelfth-century fresco; there was a look of medieval unself-consciousness about these people, all except one.

Cusk - in the New Yorker story only, after visiting her partner to find they are having an operation - in the novel this is replaced with a completely different section beginning "After my partner came out of hospital M and I met in a restaurant for lunch" and concluding "After that I didn't see M for a long time" (the words in italics are largely kept in the novel):

M had told me that she didn’t see a therapist. She took advice from her accountant. Her accountant was very down-to-earth. She looked at M’s problems from a practical point of view. Oh, grow up, the accountant sometimes said to her.

I occasionally thought of M’s parents as having sold her, though it probably wasn’t like that. The writer of the book about the stepfather also seemed to have been offered up and given to the world. The ending of childhood was not just a premature exposure to reality, it was a forsaking of the possibility of return. There was nowhere to go back to, no dream country where the original self might one day be found. Instead one was woken into an eternal godlike vigilance, as though the experience of objectification had in the end borne the fruit of objectivity. M knew that it was pointless to think about the past or the future, to feel self-pity, to believe in a story of life. She knew that people shouldn’t try to fix or solve their characters: this was how others got power over them. Instead, they should act the part of themselves.

My partner was weak after the operation. We decided to go to the coast for a few days. Through the windows of the train, the steel-gray clouds were low and full, but better things were forecast. Most of the other passengers were asleep. In sleep their features had assumed extra emphasis and individuality, sometimes disturbing to watch. It was as if they had surrendered their daytime talent for obliterating the outward traces of themselves in exchange for mental obliteration. There seemed, at that moment, to be nothing in the world more desirable than to be an actor.

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv)]

I need this book more than OXYGEN (yet again Canadians denied of the opportunity for an ARC… oh I’m sick !)

[makayla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rachel Cusk fan first, person second

[n]

cusk’s work is not always for me but the preoccupations of this one were so interesting — my favourite cusk since outline. it’s probably a fascinating read full stop, but especially fascinating for me as someone fairly up to date with The Actress’s filmography. probably would make a great companion piece to may december — loved the brief moment in the book that discusses that film. (i’m realising my favourite poster for may december looks very similar to this book cover!) great last chapter but do not know at all what was going on with that last line

[City Elf Reader (Ryan) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Airy and elusive, or grounded and profound, which page will have what performance?

[kate]

GIMME GIMME GIMME

[Tia]

Ohhhh people are going to talk about this one!

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first book by Cusk and I’m not sure what I just read. She’s a gorgeous writer with such lovely turns of phrase, but what was this? The whole story has so few of the typical descriptors. No cities, no names, sometimes no genders. Few physical descriptions except the interiors of spaces. The main character goes to the school to pick up their child but there is no mention of this child beyond that. Odd but I enjoyed it.

[Cristiano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rachel Cusk’s Life of M returns to many of the questions that made the Outline trilogy so compelling: how can a person be represented through narrative, and what remains hidden even after exhaustive description? The novel takes the form of a fictional autobiography written about M, yet M herself remains strangely absent throughout — refracted through the voice of the author-narrator rather than directly revealed. By the end, I still felt that I did not know who M was, which seems entirely intentional. At times the book even suggests that the act of describing M becomes a form of self-portraiture, with the narrator exposing herself through the attempt to construct another person.

While I did not find it quite as powerful or formally sharp as the Outline trilogy, I still found it deeply engaging and intellectually rich. It also felt connected to the world of Parade, particularly in its fragmented approach to identity and artistic self-construction, though Life of M struck me as more grounded and emotionally connected. The characters and environments felt less insulated by privilege, giving the novel a stronger sense of social and material reality beneath its philosophical concerns.

One aspect I especially admired was the recurring attention to architecture and space. Cusk moves from intimate domestic interiors to larger urban landscapes with remarkable precision, and these spatial descriptions seem to mirror the emotional and psychological distances between people. Rooms, buildings, and cities become ways of thinking about identity itself: what is exposed, what is concealed, and how people inhabit the structures around them.

Like much of Cusk’s work, this is a novel more interested in perception than resolution. Readers looking for a conventional emotional arc may find it elusive, but I appreciated its ambiguity and the way it resists ever fully “solving” M. A thoughtful and unsettling novel that lingers after finishing.

A book that surely will profit from a second reading after the ending is revealed.
Thank you the publisher and Netgalley for the digital arc!

[thebookybird · Rating 4 out of 5]

No one writes like Cusk, she isn’t doing anything particularly new, these themes have been explored and yet Cusk has such a singular, unique way of turning them over.

[mela✨]

Ma in che senso questo libro dovrebbe essere su Natalie Portman con cui Rachel Cusk è (era?) amica?
Sono curiosa adesso

[Kym · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was pleased to read an ARC of Rachel Cusk’s newest novel, Life of M, which will be published in late August 2026. I’ve read and enjoyed several of Cusk’s earlier works - The Outline Trilogy and her novel Second Place. I always appreciate her spare, smart writing style – somewhat detached from her characters and storyline, but fresh and interesting nonetheless. I usually have to put in some work when I read a Cusk novel – but I’ve always been rewarded as the hidden depths of her work are revealed.

But this time around, as I read Life of M, I felt more distanced than usual from Cusk's characters and storyline. I’m sure this was the author’s intent, of course, as this novel focuses on M, a famous actress with a highly recognizable face and a well-known life. It is natural that a character like M would hold everyone (including readers) at arm’s length! M moves through her days like a cut-out doll, always placed (or placing herself) in perfectly designed and carefully curated “sets,” and acting just as she might be expected to act in every situation. (Another reviewer called this “artistic self-construction,” which is a perfectly apt description.) As is perhaps the case with very famous celebrities, M seems to struggle with her inner life, overthinking who she really is and how others perceive her.

I was intrigued by Life of M. I found it thoughtful, unsettling, and ambiguous. Cusk’s writing was, as usual, stark and effective, but this time I also found it a bit tedious and somewhat repetitious. I wasn't always eager to pick the book up again once I'd put it aside. There was something that didn’t quite resonate with me.

And just today, I’ve read that Cusk may have patterned her character, M, after real-life actress and celebrity Natalie Portman. Somehow, I find this off-putting in a way. Perhaps that was the reason for my lack of connection? That she was writing about a real person she knew and had interacted with? (Although I will admit that as I read, and before I knew this bit of "gossip," I actually pictured Natalie Portman as the face of M. While I don’t know much about the actress, even I recognized similarities.) (Okay. It was the ballerina movie . . . ) Anyway. That's just my initial reaction to what feels like an intrusion.

Life of M was certainly a chewy read for me, and the ending really does beg for a re-read. Maybe someday. . .

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. This novel will be published August 25, 2026.

3 stars.

[Darryl Suite · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Sometimes we bump into a friend unexpectedly in the street and their face before they look up and notice us is always shocking. It is the face of this other that only the hidden camera could see. It is filled with a strain and a preoccupation that vanish the instant they recognise us. They are a little embarrassed; they know that something of their private existence has been seen. Yet we feel more love for them having seen it.”


It took me a few chapters before I could settle into this novel. A brief section about ballerinas being picked by a teacher for a future project is what brought me in. That tiny little moment.


Something about this novel’s narrative made me feel disoriented. Not because of the language, which is straightforward, almost monotonous. Not because of the plot, which is a bare bones as it comes. It’s all to do with the randomness of the actions/observations.


Cusk makes comments on fame, artistry, and aesthetic. The art of performance. The idea that we project ourselves onto celebrities; that we don’t actually see them as people. It argues against this idea of the celebrity only having agency through our conceptions of them.


I’m unsure if this book shares any deeply profound insight on any of these topics. It’s kinda saying things we already know. It’s just that the way Cusk explores these themes becomes seductive the more and more you read. It’s all in the presentation. There’s an elegiac simplicity to the rhythm; a cautious beauty.


I will say this, the last chapter is a bit unraveling, in a good way. It is a quiet disturbance that further enriches the themes. Plus, I have no idea how to interpret the final sentence. And that’s always fun.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The process had felt like a surrender to my own ugliness. It was the same ugliness in proximity to M that I had noted at the beginning, the ugliness of experience. I had dealt with that ugliness in the past by trying to pay attention to myself. But it seemed that the project had caused me to lose the ability to do that. It was this abandonment of myself that had helped me. It had enabled me to leave and go and live in someone else. Using an actor had enabled me to relinquish my experience. One day I had happened to see a tennis match playing on a television screen. While I was watching the camera cut away from the players and showed the people sitting in the crowd. There was M, smiling and laughing in a straw hat in the VIP section. I wasn’t sure I could explain to her the unbearable strain this sight had imposed on me. It was as though my most private interior world had suddenly been cast out into the light. It was as though the being in which I was attempting to live was refusing to host me any more.

 
Rachel Cusk first came to my attention with her 8thnovel “Outline” (2014) shortlisted for the Goldsmith, Women’s, Folio, Giller prizes, and first of her brilliant “annihilated” perspective trilogy with “Transit” (2016) and “Kudos” (2018) - all three Goldsmith shortlisted – a prize she finally won with her 12th novel, the male-gaze-on-women-in-art inspired “Parade” (2024).
 
Surprisingly her only recent Booker success (she was longlisted was with a longlisting for her 11th novel “Second Place” (2021) – a rewrite in her trademark style (detached, intellectual, heavily artisitically inspired, at times teetering just on the rights side of the boundary of genius and pretentiousness, profound sentences slightly undermined by the sense that the nouns can be rearranged without any loss of profundity) of “Lorenzo in Taos” (infused with her then North Norfolk Stiffkey coastal home).
 
Although I think that may change with this her upcoming 13th release, not least as judge Patricia Lockwood is a known fan of her writing and also because in my view it is her strongest novel since the trilogy – one that I will call a form of annihilated autobiography.
 
It begins (the first chapter like many of her novels already published as a New Yorker short story - one she has said was a side tribute to a 1966 New Yorker short story - Muriel Spark’s “The House of the Famous Poet”) with our unnamed narrator telling the famous actress M that “I was thinking of writing her autobiography.  She liked the idea.  She’s a good sport.  Would you just make it up? she said”.
 
And from there we get both M’s story and the narrator’s (and both entwined) – some passages told in a collective first person, others in a detached third person, both in present tense.
 
A key and recurring theme is of the idea of fame, particularly of early fame which becomes foundational to a life and gives a form of separation both from wider society and between the inner and outer/observed person. 
 
Architecture and spaces are also key to the novel – particularly curated and privileged spaces – from hotel rooms to artistic retreats – and despite being very distant from the fame/cinema scene in which M operates I did see strong cross-references to the world of global business travel.
 
There are I think copious references to other real life artistic mediums – more of which will be revealed by others – although early on I was able to ascertain links to the photography of Francesca Woodman and films by Truffaut and (I think) Kurosawa.
 
As a small stylistic note – many of the sentences repeat or vary their nouns – meaning that they differ a little from Cusk’s usual style (and the noun-rearrangement criticism) - for example It was an awakening into an awful vigilance, a permanent state of objectivity that was perhaps the strange fruit of the experience of objectification..

A final section brings M and narrator together and questions there and our conceptions of their separation and entanglement including with a rather jarring last line - which could either have a relatively superficial meaning (and explain the slightly jarring use of “my partner” by the narrator) or one which reconstitutes the whole premise of the narrator’s project.
 
Highly recommended. It is a novel I will revisit as others read it – as I have found Cusk an author who benefits both from repeat reading and from shared reading, with others picking up on ideas and references which escaped me at a blind pre-publication read. 

ADDENDUM

As I had predicted something did escape me pre publication - M is indisputably a stand in for Rachel Cusk’s friend Natalie Portman …. Some films mentioned from her career are clearly Leon (M’s first film and our first insight into her), Black Swan (detailed references to ballerinas), Vox Lux (where she plays a school shooting survivor). References that allude to Goya’s Ghost (a torture scene, a museum visit) seem more deliberately altered. Other details (her mother’s involvement in her first film, the tennis watching in my opening quote) clearly come from Portman’s life.

And this all makes the question of Portman’s agreement to this project fascinating in the context of this quote

It is about a famous actor who bears more than a little resemblance to M herself. Her repertoire, her history, her mannerisms and style are all recognisable as M’s own, with the horrifying difference that this actor is a sort of emotionless automaton, eviscerated by the globe-wide possession of her image. …. M does not know how to tell her friend that she is offended by his screenplay, which he has explained to her as a kind of game or conceit that would interrogate the notion of celebrity – and thus of self – in a new way. Without her participation, this conceit would fall flat. He evidently believes her to be capable of intellectualising her situation, and in a way she is, but something in the friend’s manner of transforming her into an object of artistic enquiry arouses in M a violent and almost inarticulate instinct of self-protection. He would doubtless be astonished to know this, given all the things from which, in his imagination, she has had to protect herself. He evidently sees her life as a chain of coercions that have loosened her hold on her own existence. He thinks he is dignifying her fundamental powerlessness. But in fact it is to this empty and passionless alter ego that she will never surrender.
 
My thanks to Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for an ARC via NetGalley

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5, rounded up.

I was rather late to the Cusk bandwagon, only discovering her mid-career with her Outline Trilogy, which I very much enjoyed, and put each volume in my 'best of ...' lists for their respective years. But I have increasingly become less enchanted with each subsequent work and this latest one I felt to be the weakest of the ones I've read.

It might well be that I am just no longer dazzled with her rather limited field of interest, nor willing to overlook it when I find myself alternately bored and/or confused. So many times with this, I found myself having to go back over sentences or entire pages, because nothing I had read 'stuck'.

The novel progressively got more interesting, but it wasn't till about two-thirds into it that there were recognizable scenes/set pieces that seemed to have any point. And my curiosity as to whether the clues that M is a thinly disguised avatar for actress Natalie Portman would come to any fruition kept me going, though if it were any longer than 114 pages, I MIGHT have very well DNF'd it.

As to that latter point, there seem obvious references to several of Portman's films, and the fact that the uncorrected proof I read several times substituted 'N' for 'M' pretty much clinched that deal. But as the final pages make clear, the author played very fast and loose with the facts (and there is, oddly, almost no mention of her marriage or kids).

You can learn a lot more from the star's Wiki page (... like that her real name is Neta Lee Hershlag!) And what to make of that curious last line? Beats me! It's almost as if Cusk just gave up, but decided she needed something of a banger to end with and create some controversy.

[CB_Read · Rating 3 out of 5]

While "Outline" is my favorite Cusk novel (and one of my favorites generally), it's not fair for readers to expect "Life of M" to be like that. In fact, with a clever move that pays off in the end, "Life of M" is kind of the opposite of "Outline." And it really works.

It takes a while to adjust to the tone of this book. Not much variety in terms of sentence structure, and the description of scenes can feel colorless and drab. (Don't worry, when this happens, it is intentional.) There are moments of color that shine through, insights that are a core part of Cusk's writing, before the tone regresses back to its mean.

Finishing this book (it's a quick read) on its especially strong ending makes you want to flip right back to the beginning and digest what you've read and look for clues of what you might have missed. There is mystery and intrigue here, but you don't really realize it until the end. That's when it becomes a whole new book.

Still, for many readers who will only read this book once, the experience can feel a little rootless and cerebral. I'm assuming most will not begin the novel again to dig deeper into its mystery.

But, like any Cusk novel, those who return to it will be rewarded by layers of language that push and tug against each other, creating friction that engages your mind and body with equal strength.

Cusk's writing has moved beyond outline and into the realm of photo-realism, depicting a world where what we see on screen should not be so easily believed.

[Danielle McClellan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh dear, oh dear, I am afraid I am becoming a Rachel Cusk outlier amongst my friends who all adore her work.

I have read others of this author’s books, and while I have not always found her distanced narrative style to be fully to my taste, I have generally appreciated her feminist perspective and her adroit blending of fact and fiction.

However, this portrait of the celebrity M was a something of a slog for me. Here, the conceit is that the author is writing a novel about a famous acquaintance without having any real relationship with or knowledge of her. If M is truly based on Natalie Portman (which fits with the detailed description of M’s movies) then I would be quite annoyed if I were her because M comes off as a shallow, self-involved paper doll. Cusk seems to conceive of her novel as a parallel performance similar to M’s film roles, but I am not sure that I buy that. It gives off an exploitative energy to me, and I wondered why not create a fully fictional character if you are not simply trying to provoke.

Cusk is as always an adept writer, so although I did not respond to this particular plot, I do appreciate that she pushes boundaries beyond the typical fictional parameters.

My thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for providing an ARC.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

In LIFE OF M, an unnamed narrator embarks on a literary pastiche of a famous actress, "M," relying on imagination and invention to fill in the gaps between perception and knowing.

Rumors are swirling prior to publication that LIFE OF M is a "dark portrait" of actress Natalie Portman. It's not dark as much as nuanced, a clear-eyed, crystalline likeness of a renowned actress who is as flawed as anyone yet must always uphold a vision of perfection.

Rachel Cusk, as ever, pairs unfussy language and an acumen for the everyday with blistering insight. We are reminded that "the novel" is always a vehicle of invention; characters, however true to life, are a device for telling a story. As Emily Dickinson wrote, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant." Is this the true story of Natalie Portman? No. This is a story about public and private life, what it means to live in the world being "known" and terribly unknown.

As the reader of LIFE OF M, we are aligned with the narrator; we are an essential part of the creation of "M." Without us, there would be no fame, no celebrity. The narrator's gaze, our gaze, is necessary to breathe life into this infamous woman on the page. Even when we are invited in to view pieces of her identity, to witness a very few banal experiences of her life, to see how her private persona is always ever public, we are inevitably left with a mirage. Can an actress not also play a part in a novel as she does on the screen?

Life of M begs the question: how well can we ever know anyone?
With our insatiable appetite for gossip and celebrity culture...how well do we know ourselves?

[Lydia Wight · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.25) Very on the fence with this one! I was surprised by how plain the writing in this book felt at first, but as I read on I was intrigued by Cusk’s reflections on authenticity and the self. Some of the insights are so poignant that I couldn’t rate it any lower than three stars.

This isn’t a casual read - You’ll have to slow down, pay attention to every sentence and sometimes pause to reflect.

I will say that the structure became repetitive. Pretty much every section follows the same pattern: lay out the setting in plain detail, introduce M and her interaction with that setting, then explicitly state the insight. I also thought some of Cusk’s interpretations stretched beyond what the situations actually supported/indicated and sometimes felt overwrought.

My biggest issue is the ending. M is so transparently Natalie Portman, with countless very very specific references to her life, that I didn’t buy Cusk’s defense when M confronts cusk. If she wanted M to be a fictional character rather than commentary on a real person (Portman), why make the so explicitly relay everything back to postman’s experiences? It felt super unfair!

[Sofia Celeste · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for an ARC of this book!

This is another great example of a quintessential Cusk novel. "Life of M" feels like Cusk's response and commentary on fame culture. The novel follows the movie star M and the exploration of one writer to try to understand who M is behind the persona of fame.

There are a lot of amazing reflections on the desire of anyone to perform and create a mask for society to perceive. This book is a must read for anyone who uses social media platforms. So much of this book is dedicated to exploring how M is perceived versus the reality of how she actually is. There were several points where it feels like Cusk blurs the lines of the fictional and real personas. The novel offered so many moments for introspection as a reader.

I know this book is one that sit with me for a while. I have a feeling that this book will become a 5 star read after a few weeks of thinking more about this book.

[ana (ananascanread) · Rating 5 out of 5]

i think rachel cusk could write about watching paint dry and i'd still find myself highlighting half the book.

life of m isn't the memoir-of-fame book the premise might suggest. it slowly turns into something much more interested in identity, performance, and the versions of ourselves we create for other people. i kept stopping to reread passages because they completely changed the way i was thinking about something. by the end i couldn't stop wondering how much of who we are is actually real, and how much is just what we hope other people will believe.

it doesn't really resolve anything, and i don't think it's trying to. by the end i wasn't sure if i'd been reading about m, or about the writer, or about the space between the two, which honestly felt like the whole point.

i truly loved this one. still thinking about it. i suspect i will be for a while.

thank you to the publisher for the advance reading copy

[Val · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

I’m honestly still not sure what I read.

This is one of those books that I can tell was written with intention, and I don’t doubt that many readers will connect with it. Unfortunately, I don’t think I was one of them. I spent much of the book feeling lost, and by the end I was reading other reviews just to see if I’d missed something.

The writing is thoughtful, but I struggled to connect with the story and the characters. Instead of feeling intrigued by the ambiguity, I mostly felt confused and emotionally detached. The ending left me with more questions than answers, and not in a way that was satisfying for me.

I have a feeling this is a book that will really resonate with the right audience, but I don’t think I was that audience. If you enjoy literary fiction that’s highly interpretive and open to multiple meanings, your experience may be very different from mine.

[Olivia Bardo · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a fascinating book. I read the entire thing in one sitting, something I almost never do.

There’s just so much that drew me in. I really loved the way Cusk drew comparisons between M and the buildings surrounding her. It’s almost as if M is one of these buildings, seemingly created and acted upon by others. She simply is.

I loved the way M’s friend and potential biographer quietly disappears throughout the story. Then it’s simply direct prose and descriptions of locations and actions. The story follows M from location to location, ending different building and rooms that are described in great detail as M herself begins to be described in a similar way. She is revealed to be a constructed image, one M is eventually displeased by.

I think at its core this book asks readers to really think about identity and if it’s something that can truly just be. Are we fabrications pieced together by those who consume us?

[Léa · Rating 4 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.25
Life of M is a quiet observation on character and people watching. (I should add I also had no idea of the drama surrounding it and the main character M being a reflection of Natalie Portman whilst reading)

Rachel Cusk always has a really gorgeous distinct way of portraying what is to be human, to be flawed and inherently nuanced in a way that never feels too flowery or forced. To the bare bones of her novels they feel so realistic and drawn from real experience (which perhaps make the conversation with Life of M in particular more fascinating). The lack of physical descriptors also allows you to theorise and place yourself within the story which has a real endearment to it. I don't quite feel like anybody is writing in the way she is and I LOVE it.

Would highly recommend to anybody who LOVES people watching / has a nosy demeanour for other peoples day to day endeavours.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Life of M is about an actress, M. As with the name of our central character, much of the narration is deliberately vague. The story could have been set anywhere in the world; the narration could be set at any point in modern times, and we don’t know for sure who our narrator is. Despite its vagueness, the book is very readable and held my attention. In a way, the vagueness worked for me. It made the story all about our narrator and M.

Much of the book reads like an observation of an actress’s life. I almost accepted it as a fictional biography of a fictional character, narrated by another fictional character, but the ending made me look back on all that I had read so far and reinterpret the book.

This is my first Rachel Cusk book. If this is her style of writing, and as I hear, there are finer works than Life of M, I will be looking forward to reading all her books.

[Adina Beck]

The literary equivalent of vagueposting, Cusk’s observations are often insightful but with nothing to ground them to…anything. This is my first time reading her but I can’t imagine being interested in this book without the names attached — Cusk’s and Portman’s. It makes me feel bad for Natalie Portman for her name essentially being used to generate interest in an insubstantial book. Maybe that’s the point: we don’t care if what we’re reading is explicitly an author’s projection, we’re desperate for any (sufficiently negative) window into celebrities’ lives.

Or, a more charitable interpretation, maybe this really was an effective therapeutic exercise for the author. Doesn’t mean it should be published.

[Cheryl Cornwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

From page one of The Life of M, the reader is forced to yield to the immediacy of Cusk’s prose. Like the titular character, M, the line between reality and unreality is blurred through Cusk’s ambiguous narration of M’s life. Are we reading the interviewer’s tale or M’s version of her career told in third-person? To read Cusk is to be taken in by the craft of writing itself; I found myself annotating and underlining nearly every page, grappling with the ideas of memory, reality, and the ability to (re)make oneself into an ever-shifting version of who we want to be. This is one of the most thought-provoking, beautiful books I have read since her Outline trilogy.

[James B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. A writer decides to write a book about M, a movie star who has been famous since she was a child. Instead of interviewing M, the author imagines what her life is like and how she’d react to events that happen to her, both externally and inwardly. How close does she get to the truth? M is slightly baffled by the finished book, but we are delighted to have read it.