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

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.

M is a film star, and one of the most recognisable faces of our time.

With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. For her, it seems, the rules of reality have melted away.

Now M has agreed to let a stranger write her biography. Their project will sprawl and expand: to the olive groves and holiday beaches where M spends her days; across hotel rooms, bourgeois facades, film sets; through endless modern cities. 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? And what in the end will M make of their work?

In Life of M, Rachel Cusk has again fashioned a new kind of literature. A novel stripped of artifice, it takes our emptiness and fills it with grace.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Audiobook, Book Club, Adult Fiction, Novels

192 pages, Hardcover

First published 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.

[emma]

i wanted to read this even before it was scandalous

(thanks to the publisher for the arc)

[esmereadsalot · Rating 5 out of 5]

cuskheads we are SO back

[Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tempted to just write ‘shrug’ and then run for cover but I suppose I should try to find something to say about this. As you probably already know, Life of M gained notoriety prior to it even being published because of the suggestion that it’s based on Natalie Portman, an acquaintance of the author’s, who is allegedly dissatisfied with how ‘she’ is portrayed. Reading the book, it’s clear Portman is indeed the basis for the character of ‘M’ (there are several beat-for-beat descriptions of scenes from her films), though there’s nothing especially scandalous about Cusk’s typically cool portrayal (unless you consider it a revelation that a very wealthy actress, famous for most of her life, might be a bit out of touch with the general public). And anyway, of course, the scenes depicting the ‘life of M’ are filtered through the perspective of the novel’s writer-narrator, who is ‘making it all up’ and ultimately writing a story that ‘isn’t about anyone’.

I’m neither a Cusk superfan nor someone looking for gossip about Portman, although you could say the marketing – if that’s what it is – worked on me regardless. My ears pricked up when I heard about this because I enjoy reading fictional depictions of fame, and I’m particularly interested in the recent resurgence of novels that feature lightly fictionalised versions of real people (as opposed to the author simply inventing a fictional celebrity). Life of M is the third such novel I’ve read this year, and as with American Spirits and Ultranatural, it didn’t manage to persuade me that the use of real biographical details truly adds anything beyond a PR-friendly selling point.

I’d also say that if you’re already a reader of fiction examining celebrity and its distorting effects, this offers nothing new. While Cusk’s observations are well crafted as part of the particular perspective they aim to inhabit, I’ve read ‘trashier’ and yes, definitely more gossipy novels about fame, fandom, influence etc that have given me much more to chew on about celebrity and our relationship with it (Idol springs to mind). I think Life of M will be most rewarding for fans of Cusk’s work who will be better equipped to situate it within her wider autofictional project. I’m happy to sit out the discourse; I just didn’t think the book was that interesting.

I received an advance review copy of Life of M from the publisher through Edelweiss.

[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.

[lark benobi]

do I really “want to read” this novel?

hmm

[Pedro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here’s my advice for anyone who’s read Rachel Cusk before and didn’t like her: don’t even bother opening this one. And now my advice for those who read and appreciated the Outline trilogy: don’t go into this expecting the same kind of book. And finally, if you like what you might call “old-fashioned storytelling”, with characters jumping out of the pages, again, don’t even bother, because that’s not what she’s going for here.

But if you appreciate really good writing, a strong sense of place, and some of the smartest and most profound insights, you can’t really go wrong with this one.

As usual when I read Cusk, I highlighted the hell out of these pages, to the point where I’m now struggling to choose a passage that might make you run to the nearest bookshop. I’ve gone for this one because I think it will speak to most readers:

The time when things happened seems to have passed. There was a time, a long time, in which reality served to delight or astonish us. It could pick us up and whirl us into something new. It worked without warning: it could intrude on our plans and forecasts in the most unexpected ways. This was because we had less control over the things that happened to us. We had fewer choices and less knowledge of the choices we had. Sometimes it was unpleasant, the intrusion of reality, and sometimes it was wondrous or hilarious. We have memories and stories we can tell about those times with their mishaps and surprises. Now, it feels as though an intrusion could only signify violence. We do nothing to court that risk; we stay close to what is known and reliable. We do not indulge our hopes nor wait for news. All at once, we suspect that the only news from now on will be bad.

See what I mean, guys? Just astonishingly insightful, and written in a way that everyone can understand. No need for words that only a ninety-year-old professor would come up with, like I so often see in reviews and comments on here. Let’s keep it real, yeah? This is the 21st century! No one’s got time for dictionaries.

[nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Major thanks to NetGalley and Faber&Faber for sending me an ARC of this in exchange for my honest thoughts:

"𝘓𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘱𝘦𝘥 𝘮𝘦,” 𝘐 𝘴𝘢𝘪𝘥. "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."

In large part, I think its marketing succeeds in the intrigue of the formation fo this book. Is this about Natalie Portman? Well, yes! At first I wondered if this was going to be vague enough to not be about her. But mentions of particular films like Black Swan even Portman’s early involvement with Léon: The Professional make it clear and obvious that it is, yes, about Portman.

This paints a different light to her, less of a person and more of a spectacle. Though most of the book is essentially an intro to acting with skimmed musings on the self, projected and innate, it surprises by the end, a narrative that becomes more about the Cuskian narrator famously present in the Outline trilogy. You could say this is a prelude in thought of sorts to the trilogy.

This will be a fan favorite for most, and a great introduction to her work if one hasn’t started the trilogy. To me, this is diet Cusk at best, but any Cusk is good Cusk as a writer who remains intriguing in contemporary literature.

[Jaclyn]

The conjecture on whether or not the subject of this book is based on Natalie Portman is funny to me – Cusk is not attempting to hide who it’s based on in ANY way. It’s on the page. And it’s not what makes this book interesting. What is much more interesting is the way Cusk aligns the reader with the narrator and makes the construction of M a collaborative process. We become complicit in the hyper scrutiny of M. Cusk is interested in artifice, authenticity and simulation as well as the conflation of persona and person. Where Cusk kills me is prose. Her language is simple, her sentences clipped. And then she kneecaps you with an observation so profound you lose breath. The best of them are at the end of this slip of a book.

[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 !)

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was 60 pages into this book when I came across the billboard at a major intersection. Any other day and I am barely glancing at it, if at all. She is beautiful, of course, but we have had nothing but an inundation of gorgeous individuals on billboards and ads for many years. It’s not new. But this time, I was fresh off of having put the book down earlier that morning. Natalie Portman stared at me, the centrepiece of a Tiffany campaign.

I discovered Cusk during deep lockdown, if I remember correctly. The Outline trilogy was refreshing. I was unable to do much of import but thinking; thoughts about family and friends and relationships current and old. I was not alone in feeling jaded, but I might have been in the minority with feeling joy. It was confusing, and Cusk’s willingness to take a chance on the hackneyed was needed. In her exploration of mundane relationship dynamics, I felt much-needed rejuvenation. Second Place and Parade after that did not quite land for me, but I have committed to reading anything Cusk puts out in my life. I may go back and play some catch-up as well.

I wish that I had never heard about Natalie Portman’s potential likeness and inclusion in this story as the character “M”. I’m doing nothing here but propagating this, but I do need to write it out somewhere. It may as well be here. I suspect I would have figured it out through Cusk’s description of M being involved in a film about ballerinas, but maybe even before that through M’s involvement (as a child) in a film with a questionable initial script. If I had missed those two, maybe I would have picked it up when she had described the sharp features of the director of the ballerina movie. Either way, I guess we’ll never know. I was robbed of that chance, because the gossip surrounding celebrity seeped in. It was not “M” doing such and such, but Natalie Portman. I read the sentences in her voice. I kept seeing her scenes in movies replaying in my head. I even kept hearing her unforgettable (for a millennial) rap lines from SNL’s “Natalie Raps” skit:

Damn Natalie, you a crazy chick
Yo shut the fuck up and suck my dick

Do you see how far you feel from anything literary as you read those two lines? Exactly.

Throughout the book, M wanders from situation to situation, usually finding herself in scenes that we have come to know with our “Celebrity 3.0” awareness in the age of parasocial relationships, mental health, and emotional abuse. I can’t help but read these reflections as Cusk’s exploration of these imagined scenes (I mean, that’s quite literally what they are) as opposed to M’s descriptions. The Cusk stand-in character barely features, anyway. We wonder a bit about what M’s early life was like. A little bit about the vapid nature of fame, a little bit about the irregularity of her relationships, and a little bit more about the urge to go back to normality. Nothing you haven’t thought about if you have so much as watched a single late night show clip in the last 20 years.

I like Cusk’s writing a good bit. Without seeming snobby, this book was finally the one that made me realize that there is a sense of shallow profundity to what she discusses. Not that she is unable to get there, but that the discussions are somewhat middlebrow. She skips across the pond, briefly making contact with the water and never really diving in deep. There are many sentences that are pure intellectual popcorn – read that in the sense of delicious, buttery goodness as opposed to empty calories. But that’s just the thing. Popcorn is also just empty calories, no matter how much I want to get my macros while shoving it in my piehole. Take this section, for instance:

“We do not, as we did when we were young, see the evening as a mysterious kingdom in which we might meet our destiny. We do not invest our hopes in the unknown. Since we ourselves are known, the unknown no longer promises us anything. We would have to become unknown again ourselves in order to receive it.”

That’s such an interesting idea. It’s offered with about as much context that I have given you here. I want to know more about the sense of mystery that this night holds. I have had that exact discussion with my best friend, making jokes about being young and walking into the night with nothing but a backpack and a sense of hope that something will come of the silence. Perhaps there is a reason that this is quintessentially tied to our youth, and Cusk goes there. We are unknown. Is she saying that our young selves are grab-bags of ideas, easily influenced, too malleable? Is she implying that our boundaries are not quite fully drawn in because of our inability to say no to the masses? Or is she using known/unknown more literally, about our stature growing? Traditionally, the best way for me to know what an author means precisely is through character and plot (no matter how sparse or apparent), or perhaps successive approximations of sentences that don’t quite touch on the subject, instead asymptotically approaching the “truth” and never quite touching it. The bubble bursts when it is met head on as such. Any more and the “literary fiction” is gone. Any less and you’re in Paulo Coelho territory. So she checkmates herself. And that is completely fine, but I believe I am seeing myself slowly moving past her, inching toward the giant, old texts that have scared me for decades.

When I read (a relatively rare occurrence for me these days, it seems), I am happy for the author to take control of the back of my head and shove it into different Pensieves at will. But I want to stay with any given memory within the Pensieve long enough to be able to gain some traction. I am not given that chance with Cusk’s works. This used to work for me, and now it doesn’t. In no way, shape, or format does that mean anything about Cusk’s talent. It just means that she continues to master her trade while I wave an impermanent goodbye through the window of the moving train. We are not in the same location anymore, but I will always come back for a short stay.

[makayla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rachel Cusk fan first, person second

[Kyle C · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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."

So Cusk begins her metafictional puzzle-book. Right at the outset, readers are teased with an oxymoronic joke: the life of M will be a ghostwritten autobiography and it will be "made-up" fiction—ergo, not an autobiography at all. Nor does it resemble a biography in form, either. Instead of birthdates, key milestones, children's names, the narrative arc of a human life, Cusk's narrator concocts an intensely introspective story of an actress (identified only as M) who sees herself reduced to an object, whose career in film has made her a constant spectacle to others in the outside world, and who feels she is only ever performing the idea of a true self. Everything in her life becomes role-play, with the writer always mysteriously accompanying and observing her over the course of a few weeks.

The novel that unfolds is a highly abstracted meditation on the phenomenology of fame—of a woman whose childhood career and subsequent celebrity divested her of a sense of normalcy and authenticity and made her question whether her feelings are ever real or just simulated. Ironically, however, Cusk's narrator anonymizes its famous subject: M is singular and separate from ordinary people, always given an exclusive table or a private room, and yet readers don't know who she even is. Reduced to a letter of the alphabet, she could be anyone.

The frenzied media speculation that M is actually Natalie Portman misses the point: it is an autobiography in search of a self, a musing on what the "auto" means in "autobiography". This is the portrait of a woman who, in trying to uncover her inner self, unravels a fiction. If elements of the novel correspond with the life and filmography of Portman, then this is just part of the metafictional pantomime: the similarities only make M more artificial and unreal, a constructed gestalt of fact and imagination. With its elaborate chronicling of an interior life, the novel is not about M at all but about the writer who follows her, imagines herself in M's head, and loses a sense of her own self in trying to understand M's experience of fame.

While the novel might be based on Natalie Portman, it is not about Natalie Portman—and that is part of Cusk's self-referential mocking. This novel is about a novelist projecting onto an actress, imagining the inner life that is kept from the public, and thereby eliding her even as it seeks to elucidate her. By conjuring the actress Natalie Portman, the novel also disappears her into a realm of fantasy and abstraction. The unstated truth of the novel is not that fame dehumanizes the actress but rather that it desensitizes everyone else to a real person, robbing them of the ability to see the actress clearly as an individual with real experiences. So the novelist invents an actress troubled by her own unrealness. It's irony all the way down.

The writer in Life of M, therefore, has made up the life of M—she has simply scripted M for a role in her book just as directors have scripted and ventriloquized her for their films. The writer is no better than the intrusive fan who follows M into a brasserie in order to get her autograph. Both the writer and the fan just see her as a thing to be watched, followed, collected, curated. Neither of them is genuinely interested in the actual inner life of the actress: the fan wants her signature (and calls her a bitch when she doesn't get it), the writer wants the material of her life for her own writing project (and she seems more interested in theorizing about film and noting the interior decor of new rooms than in truly following her subject). The true M, the woman behind the character, the self behind the persona, is irrelevant to them.

I think this is a brilliant novel. With supreme confidence and self-assuredness, Rachel Cusk does not explain her jokes or irony. It's taut and cerebral without becoming dense. Thank you to the publishers for the advance copy!

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Those looking for the alleged Natalie Portman hit piece are going to be disappointed.

That this book was inspired by the actress’ life and career is clear, but if there’s an issue between the author and the subject it’s one in which the subject gave permission and didn’t like the ultimate portrayal rather than a deliberate attack by the author. It’s possible there is still a betrayal in play here, but one of significantly lesser malice.

As for the actual book? It’s…okay.

I’m historically not a huge fan of Cusk’s work, as her distance and detachment from her subjects always make her stories hard to invest in. As with her other novels, if you’re here just for precise and spare prose, you’ll get it. But if you’re hoping for characters and a story to invest in, you’ll be disappointed.

I liked this book better than many of Cusk’s novels, mostly because I think it has some interesting things to say about observing and being observed, particularly for those who can’t ever truly escape observation.

*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*

[Anna Mikulec · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you so much FSG for an ARC!

I genuinely had no idea how I was going to rate this until I finished. Now I’m 1000% confident this is five stars.

Truly one of the most fascinating (and mentally stimulating) books I’ve read in a while! At its core, it’s an exploration of performance. How we construct identities, how other people construct identities for us, and how impossible it is to ever fully separate the person from the role they’re performing. Cusk is constantly blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality.

That’s exactly what made this such an uncomfortable reading experience at times. M is very clearly based on a real person, to the point that it becomes difficult to ignore the real world implications of writing a book like this. There are deeply personal observations and interpretations that feel invasive precisely because the fictionalization is so thin. I spent most of the book wondering whether simply calling something fiction can really absolve a writer of every ethical responsibility toward the person being fictionalized.

BUT what makes this book so brilliant is that Cusk doesn’t just explore that question within the story itself. She takes it one step further and makes the reader participate in it. The entire book encourages you to make assumptions about who these people are. You’re led to believe that you understand who’s speaking and who’s being portrayed. Then the ending fundamentally destabilizes that belief.

I obviously can’t explain exactly what happens without ruining it, but the final pages recontextualizes the entire book. It isn’t necessarily a twist in the conventional sense. It instead directly implicates the reader in the book’s obsession with identity, performance, and the act of constructing another person from incomplete information. Cusk doesn’t let you comfortably sit outside the philosophical questions she’s asking. She turns them back onto you. The ending looks you right in the eyes and asks why YOU felt so comfortable making assumptions about these characters you don’t truly know. I absolutely fucking LOVE when authors do that! The book doesn’t just talk about the unreliability of perception and the artificiality of identity. It forces you to experience it yourself.

Honestly, that ending made all of my earlier assumptions and discomforts with the book even more fascinating. The ethical questions aren’t simply something you can point at and say “that’s problematic.” They deliberately become part of the book’s architecture. Cusk doesn’t simply explore her philosophical questions. She puts those questions to the test through the construction of the book itself.

Then there’s that very last page… Might just be the most subtlety brilliant last line of a book I’ve ever read. I will be thinking about it for a very long time.

This absolutely won't be for everyone. It’s quiet, abstract, deliberately ambiguous, and much more interested in psychological and philosophical questions than conventional plot. It’s exactly the kind of book I personally become completely consumed by though, and I can’t recommend it more!

[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

[Jananee (headinherbooks) · Rating 1 out of 5]

rachel cusk’s writing is absolutely not for me

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

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

[Matthew Metheney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, I miss Cusk’s writing and with this, we are so back. Her writing is just 😩.

[kate]

GIMME GIMME GIMME

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This did not appeal to me quite as much as Cusk's other recent fiction, but it’s still an amazing book, still consisting of narrative rather than dialogue, still with a rational narrator but this time less focused on others’ storytelling (although often on another person, who may or may not exist) and more on observing, analyzing, making general statements and statements about characters. What is special about Cusk’s rationality is how emotional it is, how both cold and warm, how sharp and how moving. What bothered me here is that Cusk gave herself (her narrator) too much leeway, and it allowed the narrative to wander in ways that sometimes didn’t work for me.

[Jangoreadz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mind numbing drudgery. l saw all the news about how this book is about Natalie Portman and she is unhappy. She is unhappy, because this book is boring…

I still believe Rachel Cusk is an alt version of Karl Ove Knausgaard and I prefer Karl Ove

[Boris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Are you a guy or a girl?

[Olivia Vreeland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rachel always doing the same shtick and I’m never really into it unfortunately.

[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.

[Aysha · Rating 5 out of 5]

She did it again!

[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.

[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.

[Misha · Rating 2 out of 5]

(rounded up from 1.5)

This was my first Rachel Cusk book, and I'm not sure I'd read another based on this one. I'm not sure who the audience is for this experiment, but it's not me because it neither commits to being factual nor uses well-known actor Natalie Portman as a jumping-off point to create an interesting character study of an actor's life. The main character in this book is the supposedly fictional actor M, and her life is completely devoid of any kind of humanity or interiority, which makes the whole thing terribly uncompelling and uninteresting to me.

For most of this book, I was committed to giving it one star because it was a bit of a slog for me. There are a few points in the book where the author veers into some kind of dive into character, such as when M wanders into a theatre that is showing one of the movies she was in and her experience relating to the movie as a viewer and even her own appearance in the latter half of the movie. There are moments like this that are actually engaging to me and hint at us arriving with the author to an interesting commentary on the life of an actor, but mostly it talks about desks, rooms and walking dogs, which honestly bored me to tears.

[Sara Hughes]

i’m not really sure how to rate this. to be fair i love celeb gossip and i love rachel cusk, but the two just don’t really go together. i’m a self professed code red call 911 cuskhead, but this was probably her worst book imo. it’s still written so beautifully and in ways that made me deeply reflect, so i can’t say i hated it. and because of the marketing there are now a bunch of normies who have never heard of cusk until now who have only read like heated rivalry and other YA novels that are angry that this wasn’t actually a celeb gossip book about natalie portman. part of me really thinks that natalie isn’t mad at all and is totally in on it because it’s obvious that it’s all made up. i don’t even dislike unreliable narrators like this, but it just felt like the marketing overshadowed the book, because it wasn’t anything like how it had been presented. she shouldn’t have ever done this, it just seems so beneath her. but if you strip away the natalie portman narrative, it’s a well written book about two people hanging out and talking about life in paris.