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, Audiobook, Contemporary, Book Club, Novels, 21st Century

188 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]

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.

You can listen to the podcast gang discussing the German translation Das Leben der M here: https://papierstaupodcast.de/podcast/...

[Anna Dorn]

life of i’M falling asleep

[emma]

i wanted to read this even before it was scandalous

(thanks to the publisher for the arc)
(review to come)

[Blair]

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.

[esmereadsalot]

cuskheads we are SO back

[Roman Clodia]

It was as if I was acting, while M came across as authentic and real. It was as if she was the only one good enough at acting to attain reality.

Oh, this is such a slippery text full of the kind of paradoxes on show in the quotation above: that reality can feel like, and slip into, performance; that only a supreme ability to act can simulate any form of reality. As we read through this Cuskian narrative, we will all, I'm sure, navigate it in different ways, and I'm looking forward very much to read different views from my own. What I will say up front is that the media frenzy about Natalie Portman is as simulated as anything else in the book (see, Cusk does have a sense of humour!) and that this is only nominally and marginally about fame, though it is very interested in ideas of observation, the gaze, reflections and what might pass as reality.

For me, I was thinking of Baudrillard - the term 'simulation' appears six times in the text, and the very concept of reality is interrogated and shown to be performative in many cases. The literary 'salon' held in an empty bookshop particularly comes to mind as the media and brand sponsoring the staged event insist on filming it first without an audience as they 'need images and content that are not compromised by reality'. Similarly, a café that looks as if it is authentically (another key word in the text) retro, starts to look, on closer view, like a 'hard-headedness or harshness that makes the café's authenticity seem more deliberate and strategic after all.'

This concern with shifting modes of identity and representation, reality and reflection, performance and authenticity play out at various levels: there is the 'I' of the frame narrative, a Cusk-like author who tells M they are going to write her autobiography which, it is implied, is partly what we are reading; there is the 'we' who seems (mostly) feminine whose meditations make up much of the exposition of the text and which might be thinking back to Annie Ernaux's use of 'we' in The Years, albeit here used more fluidly; and there is an anonymous voice of the 'autobiography' (which is, of course, not an autobiography at all as it is not written by the subject and barely traces a life in any conventional sense) which is grounded through very detailed descriptions of settings and locales usually indicated by a 'It is a...', creating a material reality that contrasts with the amorphous performances of selves and identities that take place within it, as if on a series of stages that, nevertheless, pass as 'reality'. At one point, the narrator thinks about how behaviour at a corporate meeting is shaped by the number of times we've watched corporate meetings on TV and in films and wonders whether this series of representations that control our performances ever had a material reality or just a constant stream of media regressions.

But, I'd say, this book isn't just an intellectual exercise in playing with and exploring intellectual and abstract ideas (and concerns about reality and illusion have always been a crucial topic of literature from its very beginnings, way before Baudrillard connected these ideas with late twentieth century capitalism) - there are moments when the narrative just puts its finger on something that I can personally identify with in a breathtaking manner. One of them, for me, is when the 'we' voice asks what happens to our identity when we're lost in concentration in work: 'concentration is like a white field into which we levitate, leaving ourselves behind in time'. Yes! Who are we in those moments? For me, it's an intellectual state when my whole being seems concentrated in my mind; for others it might be the physicality of extreme danger or the pressure of sporting achievement - in any case, that sense of consciousness of I-ness being switched off in Cusk's 'white field' is probably one of the few when we are not, consciously or unconsciously, performing for other gazes.

There's so much more I could say about this book (and all my annotations!) but I genuinely think each reader (and re-reader) will have a different experience and find different priorities. Overall, I'd say this builds on Cusk's previous work (so if you've hated The Outline Trilogy, Second Place and/or Parade, there's a high chance this won't be for you) - I'll be reading it again at some point in that restless, impatient wait for what Cusk does next.

[Matthew Ted]

Awful. Wooden and lifeless. Last year I put my head together with a friend to drum up our list of the best books of the century so far (bold, I know). Either way, Cusk’s Outline trilogy was one entry. We both put it forwards gladly. And yet here we are with Cusk writing a novel like this. Pages and pages of cold, pseudo-philosophical rambling. If we consider the fact that some of the greatest books ever written seem to have their own beating heart, then Life of M is certainly a cadaver.

At university and in my early 20s, as I was starting to get quite a few books, and classics, under my belt, I began to consider myself something of an expert. There was a lot of kidding myself, I think. I can’t say for sure, but this might have been one of those books I pretended to like a lot more than I actually did, had it been published ten years ago. Before my current job I taught, for many years, Wing Chun Kung Fu. When I first started learning, let’s say, three months in, I genuinely believed that with my newfound knowledge I could take on five men in a barfight. By the time I had trained for over a decade and was opening my own school to teach it, I felt as unprepared and amateur as I’d felt my entire ‘career’. I realised how little I knew in the beginning, but how brilliant I thought I was!

Similarly, aged 20, I might have said that this Cusk was fantastic and unlike anything I’d ever read before, but only because I'd read so little. So I might have exaggerated my feelings. I might have imagined I could take on five men in a barfight. Now I can happily admit that this is a terrible novel... and that five men would most certainly kill me in a barfight.

[Katia N]

The author is an author insofar as he enters into a role the way an actor does and identifies himself with that projection of himself at the moment of writing.

(Italo Calvino from ‘Level of Reality in Literature’)

Almost ten years ago Cusk famously proclaimed: ’I don't think character exists anymore.However, it seems that at least one of her narrators in this novel has disagreed choosing a risky game of creating one. Would this narrator succeed?

This novel is focused on authenticity of selfhood, perception of time, social class and performance. The novel is by itself a performance, an experiment how to empty one’s self of its attributes: certain acquired values, memories of the past and plans for the future, to make a space available for an act of a creation as well as a new living. How this process seems to be perpetuating itself in spite of natural constraints of body and time and how this act interjects with reality. A self like a street ‘emptying and filling and emptying again’.

Unlike Parade this work is quite austere in terms of art. So i’ve decided to add some here. This is ‘The Print Gallery’, a lithograph by Escher.



A man viewing a print of a seaport in a gallery, with the gallery itself appearing within the print containing him, and it goes on and on in an infinite regress.

There is no easy way to begin with this novel. Let’s say, once upon a time there was an author Rachel Cusk and an actress Natalie Portman. But we would not talk about them that much. We do not need to. Only thing is relevant is that Cusk has written and published ‘Life of M’ and used a few details of filmography biography of Portman (who started acting young and being a face of a brand). So lets leave them and start again. Initially, there are two personages in the novel: a nameless ‘I’, our initial narrator, and her good acquaintance, an actor called ‘M’. They are both expats living in an unnamed city. It is evident the city is Paris as ‘ugly tower’ is mentioned pretty soon. ‘I’ opens the novel:

‘A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea…Would you just make it up? she said.’

With this opening, we are Immediately thrown into an ambiguity of the origins and nature of the planned text. There is obvious incongruence in terms. There was of course a famous precedent ‘Autobiography by Alice Tocklas’ written by another Parisian expat Miss Stein. Her conceit was to write a book mainly about herself, but to make it as if her partner, Alice, written her own biography. Or maybe Stein’s sincerely wanted to write about Alice. Still the result was mainly about herself. Maybe there is a hint in this story for ‘I’’s text. We do not know. In any case ‘I’ is given a creative license by M to ‘make up’ a text featuring someone like M. ‘I’ has got a good reason to escape into this project: a crisis due to serious illness of her partner.

An abrupt cut (or turn), and the readers are introduced to the new characters in a text that looks like a narrative within a narrative that contains two parallel threads.

The first character is ‘We’. I find We more intriguing creation than M. We is peculiar construction: fluid and constantly toggling between being collective vs individual. Cusk has already used a similar ambiguous surrogate identity in ‘Parade’. Cusk seems to be doing something with gender attempting to move beyond it. We is possibly designed to be genderless, though there are a few scenes where We is clearly acting as a female. Being a female, M is always called ‘actor’, never ‘actress’. ‘I’’s gender is never directly mentioned. This game persists to the very last sentence.

We have recently moved to Paris. Stimulated by the move, We seemed to consciously shed the vestiges of their old identity such as connections or memories as a meaningless ‘illusion’. Not unlike Beckettian Malone, We want to be in the present resisting the directionless flow of their subjective time: ’We try to hold ourselves, here at this point in time, against what feels like a powerful tide dragging us backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards over something solid and unmoving far below.’ This appears to be not easy. So as many flâneurs before, We walk Paris streets and parks, We observe; We record. The current emptiness at their core, is not totally desired: We want to fill it, to ‘create’ a new ‘We’ but unsure how.

The second thread is what seems to be a film script. It is presented as a series of similarly structured scenes. Each scene starts with a detailed, almost ekphrasistic description of a particular set: an office, an airport, a spa, an old house in a country. The main acting person in there is M. However it is clear that this M is a new fictional character created for the purpose of this screenplay. It seems plausible that this script is the ‘made up autobiography’. M acts in a variety of social and personal situations like business meetings, boat holidays or staged interviews.

This part of the text is written in a present tense and in simple sentences (common for a script). This M has got some interiority but only in a present tense. Similarly to We, this is her choice how to live. ‘Now, increasingly, she surrenders herself to this weightlessness, this eternal present-tense in which there is no memory and therefore no judgement.’

In the one of those scenes, M is offered a screenplay by her male friend:

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.

Is it Cusk’s conceit for this novel as well or isn’t exactly? Now it is probably evident why I’ve started with the image. Both Escher and Cusk play the game of mise en abyme (literally in English ‘of placed into abyss’), a technique of creating a recursive loop of placing a copy of an object of art within itself (respectively the print for Escher and the text for Cusk). Often this creates an illusion of moving towards ‘abyss’, basically the point where the boundaries between the images and its copies would merge into one single point. Obviously, this point is never reached. Escher uses the white spot in the middle cover this. Cusk might just hint on this to show the fluidity of the boundaries between identities of the creator and her subject. Cusk creates ‘I’ who creates M who reads and rejects the script possibly written by a person like ‘I’. (Or even We).

In both cases the next iterations of the object is not the same as the original. For Escher it is the turning and size. For Cusk it is more complicated. In this new cycle of recursion, M is suggested to play a shell of her true self.

This is as if Hamlet plays himself in the play he stages yet deliberately conceals the power of his true feelings, adding ambiguity in the process instead of destroying it.

It is clear that in writing her ‘autobiography’ ‘I’ can foresee the complexity of M’s character who might not want to pose as a shell. Her M is not ‘emotionless automation’. However it is fair to say that ‘I’ creates a more abstract generic portrait of a famous actress as imagined by a possibly famous writer. Her M does posses an identity but struggles nevertheless with its boundaries. Also often she tries not to reveal herself in interactions with other people while proclaiming that her secret is ‘not having secrets’.

In another scene, M is watching a film where a star actor experiences a breakdown on stage ‘suddenly paralysed by the horror of her pretence in the midst of the real world and its evil.’ This leads to a remark in the text that this actor realises she ‘has no identity, and hence no morality’ and in her delirious state, ‘like a bodiless soul, she tries to find another person in whom she can live.” This episode bears quite a resemblance to the scenario in a screenplay suggested to M by her male friend. What is more interesting is the ambiguous source of these remarks. Is it M’s internal voice who potentially identifies with the star actor here or is it the narrator? In the latter case, it is supposedly ‘I’ who is projecting herself into this text. Therefore it is ‘I’, not M who is trying to find ‘another person in whom she can live.’ Likely she is looking for this in her creation. An actor as a character might be the most suitable for this exactly because an actor has do be able to find an empty place in her identity to be able to ‘fill’ it with the features of a stranger and to do it again and again, each time a new.

Like in the “Print Gallery’, the readers are thrown yet again into this spiral of the recursive loops where the actors become the viewers and identities are flowing between the authors and the characters in a waves.

An article from internet about Escher’s work has helped me a lot to anchor my thoughts about this novel.

Escher’s image: ’The work depicts a scene that contains itself, creating a paradoxical loop where inside and outside, observer and observed, move closer to become indistinguishable.’

In another scene of the script, ‘while not quite still a young girl herself, M was chosen for the starring role in a film about a young girl chosen for the starring role in a ballet.’ Yet again here, the readers are made to stare into abyss of Mise en abyme’.



Here the artist Marina Stern appropriates the likeness of Venus from Botticelli, turns her in profile and throws her into a frame when an inside is also an outside of the next frame. Venus is always both inside and outside. It seems the same happens to M when she plays a ballerina. To an extent, the same happens to M as an actress in any role. Also it applies to ‘I’ (and Cusk) as an author when she appropriates certain features of a famous actor and her films to throw it inside of her imagination in order to come outside with a new representation in her book.

This image is like frozen. ‘A film is also always happening; its origins in time have been frozen through the process of recording. M could always be found in her films, living the same instants over and over.’ In the novel time seems to be frozen too, not only because of the loops, but by its characters’ desire to live in the present.

In one of the scenes, M has got a moment of contemplation in her empty office. However, it seems that at some point her thoughts about herself lead to an unconscious preparation for a role. ‘In the light-filled silence of her office the two things – reflection and creation – seem for an instant to draw closer to each other and she – so thoroughly observed – becomes momentarily the observer.’ In this process, M seems to dissociate from herself, her own identity, in order to be able to see it ‘from outside’ and to use its attributes as a building material for her new creative act. In a strange way, this state of heightened creativity seems to be not that different from the experience of traumatic dissociation by the little girl, the victim of sexual abuse by her stepfather, in Sad Tiger, a memoir by Niege Sinno mentioned in the text.

We called their writing ‘recording’ as if they are able just record reality in all its complexity . It seems to work ‘from outside’. However when We try to look closer at their own selves, they seem to hit a limit of observation staring into an abyss. ‘Like the ugly tower we see everything from where we are, except ourselves.’ At the same time, ‘everyone else seems to know who we are.’ This gives rise to a question: to what extent anyone’s identity is constructed by external observers? And if one peels all these external labels off, what would remain, if anything?

In one of her trademark provocations, Cusk throws a boomerang by connecting in a single paragraph the status of observer vs observed with the desire for anonymity by a famous person and contrasting it with much less desired ‘anonymity’ imposed by the society on the ‘less fortunate or more powerless’.

As a child actor, M was woken into consciousness of herself so early that she has no memory of being unnoticeable. The awakening was the product of being observed, but it also made her into an observer. Perhaps this is what the desire for anonymity actually is: a wish or a need not to stop being observed but to stop observing. Nearly everyone, walking down the street, can see someone less fortunate or more powerless than themselves. Wouldn’t it be a relief not to see them.

The provocation is not in the creation of an anonymity spectrum uncomfortable on both ends. Instead, it is in suggestion that the solution of the issue would be basically to ignore its existence by diverting one’s eyes. And before someone starts screaming, is this basically a challenge to hypocrisy imbedded and cultivated in our societies? Does she just describe the current reality?

Escher image. The work also engages questions of representation and reality when the boundary between them including the viewer and the viewed becoming unstable.’

It seems in our times more than ever, this border between reality and its representation becomes very porous and unstable. What would be considered a representation before very quickly is turning into the real: words become actions. Personal and political, on-line and off-line: all of these gets mixed and feeding each other. The mechanism of this phenomena is more visible in the actors or writers’ lives as for them this boundary was always more slippery.

When M has to play a scene of a ballerina’s selection for a performance, she suddenly realises that it has stopped being a role for her: instead it is her own intimate experience, her ‘agony’. She is shaken by ‘the violence of this scene, which with one blow shook the barrier between her self and her role that she had always thought it natural – necessary even – to impose.’ However, in other situation M seems to realise that at least some part of her private life is more performative: ‘M’s personal task is to become real,..she is relieved not to have to take this task entirely seriously.’ She is not alone in this.

The performative aspect of reality is revealed in the book in many situations. We themselves claiming their work ‘involving performance’. On the other hand, We, perceive to be ‘real’ in their writing as ‘reality recording itself on us rather than the other way around.’ According to them, their friends understand that We’s ‘personal emergency is to some degree of a public emergency’. We feel they represent some distillation of collective consciousness. In her Frankfurt lectures, Bachmann said ‘I no longer exists within history, but history exists in the I.’ Different pronouns but a similar sentiment.

In their walks under Paris bridges, We see ‘the stink of urine and the detritus of human occupation: soiled bedding, empty wine bottles, sometimes a solitary shoe. We cannot help but find an aesthetics of an absurd spectacle in this very real life of the homeless. ‘These scenes seem somehow composed, like stories or photographs, yet their subject is missing.’ This detritus is the evidence of someone’s desperate, likely unhappy survival. While fully realising this fact, We cannot help but minutely perceive it as a sordidly beautiful decorations of an empty scene. It is easy to start moralising at this point. But i am not sure if the impact on the readers would be as striking and discomforting in case this depiction here would be replaced by Cusk’s manifesto on sympathy for the homeless with the attached action plan.

‘I’ ends up revealing her true vulnerability to M by being sincere about the purpose and mechanics of her ‘made up autobiography’. It seems she expects M to appreciate how the work of the author is similar to the one of an actor: both escape reality, time, and their own identity to give life to something new, to create. It is a two way street as they might add into the mix some of their own soul. Like a fictional personage in script, M the friend seems to be not totally happy with the analogy. She misses the complexity of ‘I’’s conceit and wants to be depicted in more relatable, simple manner. But the work has been written and it would have its own life. There is no beginning or end to this. It is ‘an infinite sequence’ of a sort.

PS
I’ve run out of space here. So please find the fuller&better edited version of this piece at my Substack. Otherwise keep reading:-) My initial reaction post is in the comment thread.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

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

[Jaidee]

1.8 "a book for Melania and Meghan" stars !!

Cusk has become a parody of herself falling into vulnerable narcissism, micro-agressions, false psychological insight, misandry, banal descriptions, affluent haze. From suburban white feminism she has moved into empty, overly assured, cocky dullness, gazing at the self with cleverness that no longer is well... clever....

The Outline Trilogy and Second Place were absolute masterpieces of crystalline discernment. These four books will remain some of my most treasured reads. Parade sparkled in prose but that narcissistic false nonsense was already blooming.

Whiny , entitled, upper middle class (and wealthy) mostly white women with their manufactured victimhood and micro traumas may have been de rigeur in 2005 but now that we know how much toxic femininity has damaged our society lets move on...

Cusk I think I may be out....

The prose is still wonderful in places so my 1.8 experience will be boosted up to 2 stars...

[lark benobi]

do I really “want to read” this novel?

hmm

[Lula Earley]

Tortured auto fiction writer born with a silver spoon in her mouth with notable noble savage complex about bus drivers and trash collectors writes a severely self preoccupied book wherein she creepily and invasively projects her severe self preoccupation onto an acquaintance who she is jealous of. 1.5

[Paul Ataua]

The novel begins with the writer asking a famous actress if she can write her biography and being given the go ahead with the added suggestion that she just makes it up. What we get is a series of vignettes and thoughts on those vignettes bringing together the actress’s life and the writer’s experiences. To get it out of the way, the actress is definitely Natalie Portman and the novel is definitely NOT about her. I was surprised how much I enjoyed this, especially Cusk’s prose and the way she can take the simplest event, slow it down, and bring out the uncanny in it. I loved the way she uncovers the complex within the simple. It's a really good read, and I am so surprised by the many poor reviews it has received.

[Pedro]

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.

[Paul Fulcher]

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.

[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.

[Sam Quixote]

M is a beautiful Hollywood movie star who has appeared in numerous big movies since she was still a kid and is now a mother herself. The unnamed narrator of the novel is a writer whom M admires. Life of M is an autobiography of the movie star by the unnamed writer.

So here’s the scuttlebutt: M is Natalie Portman and the narrator is Rachel Cusk. The two know each other, Portman has talked about her admiration of Cusk, and they may have been working on a project together that may have been a failed autobiography of Portman that Cusk turned into this novel.

But even not knowing the above, assuming you’re a movie fan, you could probably work out who M is given the descriptions of some of the movies she’s appeared in (Leon, Black Swan, Vox Lux) and that she’s the face of a major perfume brand (Dior).

I don’t know how close Cusk and Portman were or are, whether theirs was a brief hello/goodbye relationship, or if there’s any enmity, but I think that mystique will help sell a few copies of the book as some people might read it thinking they’re getting an insider’s view of Portman’s life.

If any of those people are like me, it’ll be a disappointing read for them as Life of M is horribly boring, pointless, and utterly uninsightful.

The narrator describes M acting in movies, dining in fancy restaurants, having meetings in fancy cafes, going to an art gallery, a curated book event, being approached by strangers in public for selfies. Let’s pretend Cusk never met Portman - this is material anyone could’ve written about a famous movie star as it requires zero imagination (a point that is even mentioned by the narrator in the book).

There is no story, just some vague guff about M wanting to live a more authentic life or attain a level of realism that’s evaded someone who has been super famous for most of her life. M comes off as cold and isolated, but emotionlessly so - her life is neither portrayed as tragic or positive, it just is her state of being.

Similarly, I didn’t feel envious of her existence on any level even though it sounds like a charmed life. M is never so much a fully realised character as much as she seems like a photo of someone famous and nothing more. There are so many detailed descriptions of furniture it made me wonder if Cusk is comparing M to these objects - something that simply exists.

Perhaps that’s the point Cusk is making - the trade-off of being a successful actor who is able to emulate a range of people and emotions is not to be a real person themselves in their private lives and can only exist in a state of shallowness?

Towards the end - after yet another elongated passage on a room’s furnishings - I found it more engaging to find the right word to describe the book. A synonym for vacuous - banal, empty - and that’s how I ended the book: thinking of how to describe my boredom with the novel.

In the end it doesn’t really matter if this is an accurate look at Natalie Portman’s life or completely fabricated by Cusk (not least as we’re unlikely to ever find out) as Life of M is thoroughly dull regardless. Life of M is a vapid (that was the synonym I was searching for), uninspired non-narrative about a dreary subject - avoid!

[Alan]

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.

[Ira Madison]

More time was spent describing rooms in excruciating detail than M’s actual psychology. I found her to be Rachel Cusk’s weakest protagonist, tbh, and the writer, I, was mostly a cypher too.

[Jananee (headinherbooks)]

rachel cusk’s writing is absolutely not for me

[nathan]

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.

[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 !)

[Bogdan]

Life of Meta
(see update below)


This book is a character study of the title figure – a very famous actress. It is an essay (or trial) in prose, an exercise in contemplation – and an attempt at actually seeing – a person behind her Persona.

Originally, ‘persona’ was the ancient mask worn by actors on stage. It is, by derivation, a social mask in the modern, Jungian understanding of the term, or also, in postmodernity, the ‘profile’ as the form taken by our presence on social media – that which we expose and perform of ourselves in our common virtual reality. Persona by Ingmar Bergman is one of the films M watches in the course of this book. The film is not named, like all the few others she watches, but can be immediately identified by any cinephile. Just as in the case of the others, what makes the film recognizable is that something very specific about it is described. This something is what deeply impresses M and which simultaneously expresses something about her to us, reveals a concealed and authentic part of her to the narrator and to us, the readers who are trying to perceive M’s true(r) self. Much of what we get is through second-order observation.

M watches an old film, featuring a legendary star. The star plays a theater actor, who breaks down in the middle of a public performance. The actor is suddenly paralyzed by the horror of her pretence in the midst of the real world and its evil. She sees that she has no identity and hence no morality of her own. She enters a state of delirium, in which, like a bodiless soul, she tries to find another person in whom she could live.

I think what works very well in this book-experiment is the narrator’s unintrusiveness in the psyche of its main character. It is introspective in a very indirect way, almost extrospectively introspective. M is given ample room (from the public to her private sphere) to gather knowledge of herself from many angles, in contact with others or alone. Yet she remains as elliptical a person as her initial suggests.

I have unfortunately not read the book, but fortunately listened to it as read by the author herself. I wrote down the quote above – from which I deduced that M was watching Persona – while listening to Rachel Cusk read it, so I'm not entirely sure about the punctuation. Another classic film in which M sees a part of herself is Les quatre cent coups by François Truffaut.

I think one would get more from this book, and from cinema as art, by watching or having watched those two films than by being familiar with the entire filmography of Natalie Portman, who is supposed to have inspired the character of M

I’ve listened to the audiobook for free on Libby. It contains a treat at the end: an interview with the author.


Update:

Thanks to a discussion with Katia and having listened to the audiobook more carefully for the second time, I felt I had to make the following update:

I'm a bit allergic to what is widely called 'metafiction', but, if this is the case here, it is also – as Vincenzo Latronico remarks in the interview he conducts with the author – a going back to pre-modern modes of making fiction, where the author (we could take Cervantes in the second volume of Don Quixote, for example) was 'simply' present in the narrative, made all sorts of free interventions in it, and, oblivious and unconcerned about what the critics would later call metaficción, he just naturally and indiscriminately referred to his characters – who were already made famous by the first published volume – as characters from that book and as real-life persons. Similarly, in Life of M, we have a simple fictional quartet: The narrator is a character and also the writer of the book; M is a character, but the actress who is the model for the character M is also a character, albeit a more real one, just like the author. And just as the latter exists in real life, we can suppose that the living model for M also exists there (the bulk of this figure being, as many have deduced, Natalie Portman, but I think M is a hybrid of hers and the generic contemporary actress).

With the intuition of a writer who personally knows an actress, meets her and discusses things with her on several occasions, the narrator tells us about the 'life of M'. M is mostly deduced from, inspired by, the actress. The narrative is a meditation on M, and a trial at working out who she is in essence. The ironic result of all this is that, at the end, the actress is confronted with M, but she only vaguely and partially recognizes herself in that narrative mirror.

It turns out that ‘despite’ her keen intuition and deductive prowess, the author has merely created a character – which, of course, is not a minor accomplishment, but it is only natural for writers to do so…

The part of M that doesn't resemble the actress (Natalie Portman) pertains to that of the more 'generic contemporary actress', which means that M, although inspired by a living being, is (mostly) a figure, a type.

Coming back to the classics, I can say that the narrator is like a Pygmalion who sculpts M from reality, from her daily life (as perceived by the narrator), from the backstage of the actress's celebrity. But, just like a postmodern Galatea, M breaks loose from the hands of her creator and comes to autonomous, albeit fictional, 'life'.

In other words, I can also say, quoting Katia, that M is mostly the 'projection' of the author, thus the ghost haunting this book.

PS: I think I've just written a meta-review :D

[Kyle C]

"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!

[Yalla Balagan]

A nameless writer meets a movie star called M in a bookshop and proposes to compose her autobiography. Make it up, M says, half joking...

Chapters alternate between glossy scenes of M at spas, film shoots, literary salons and dinner parties, and quieter passages back home, where the writer's own partner occupies a hospital bed behind curtains that stay half open. Late in the book, the two strands collide.

M plays a cipher on purpose, an actor so practiced at performance that her face offers the effect of a screen test for feeling, instead of feeling in the flesh. She poses for a brand while a nearby family, busy with pastries, catches her by accident in their photo. She lies still for a masseur she has visited many times, and he still gives a different massage every session. At a glass spa above the city, cold water pours over her head again and again, an accidental replay of a torture scene from a film she once starred in.

At home, the writer's own crisis threads through every glossy scene, hospital corridors and plastic chairs standing in stark contrast to M's marble fireplaces and private spas.

The M on the page barely resembles the M living outside the pages. The writer conjured her from sorrow and borrowed fame, a stunt double for a life too painful to shoot directly.

The scenes come pre lit. The characters are typecast by circumstance, the nannies playing mothers, the mothers playing employers, a nanny at the school gate playing daughter to an absent mother, gone abroad for money. Cusk keeps the camera rolling on cruelty without commentary, a mercy of a sort.

An "M is Natalie Portman" reading isn't just fan speculation, it is impossible to deny. It is a thinly veiled, largely unflattering portrait of Portman, who has been a public champion of Cusk's work. Portman picked Cusk's 2024 novel Parade for her book club and has spoken warmly about her as a favorite writer, and the two both live in Paris.

The fictional M's filmography maps onto Portman's real signature roles, including a child-star breakout, a ballerina role, and a "vox lux"-style pop-star part, and M is a former child star raising kids largely alone in Paris, which lines up well with Portman's biography.

Cusk and Portman are rumored to be friendly acquaintances rather than close friends, and there's no public confirmation Portman consented to or even knew about the project in advance. Portman's publicist and Cusk's publisher both declined to comment when asked directly. Does this add up to betrayal and backstabbing? Does a novelist owe a real person permission to become raw material? Is this part of the discomfort the book provokes on purpose? After all, actors do the same for a living.

Life of M turns a famous face into a hall of camera flashes bouncing light off an empty center. The more thoroughly a person gets photographed, staged, and typecast, the more thoroughly that same person loses any grip on something genuine beneath the ring of lights. Fame plays the part of a magnifying glass aimed at absence. Watching someone closely turns out to be a poor substitute for knowing them.





❤️ 🇮🇱

[Isa]

3.5/5 As a long time Cusk lover I am very happy with the new release! Though not a top favourite of mine I found this new way of exploring modern life (as she typically does) through the lens of celerity quite interesting. At times it does feel like a slightly more dialed down version of Cusk, almost more accessible in a way - though i'm not sure that's the right term to use. Definitely a bit breezier and i guess personal in a sense given it's structure and premise, but well done nonetheless! Her prose remains authentic to the writting we all love and adore, and i did indeed find myself bookmarking many passages for future reference.

[makayla]

Rachel Cusk fan first, person second

[imogen]

this book was kind of a nothing burger except for the ending. i feel indifferent towards it.

[Erica Naegle]

I’ll be honest, I read this because of the rumors/buzz about this book being based on Natalie Portman, and had also read that those reading it for that reason with the hope of an interesting story would be disappointed. That was so accurate. This very loosely uses that hype (which the author’s team seems to have planned), to pull an audience. So they were successful in that. However, the main character is barely provided as a foundation for any kind of story. If you want to read someone waxing poetic about desks in a room and barely making an effort to appear as if they tried to come up with believable thoughts of a famous person, then this is the book for you. I highly doubt being world famous truly makes someone incapable of furrowing their brows as a true response out of feeling real feelings and only because they sit and think that is what seems to be the correct response. Just because you don’t relate to the world in the same way as everyone else doesn’t mean you’re a psychopath. This book was painfully boring and I’m so glad the audiobook was only four hours so I didn’t have to DNF it. even then, I came close.
Pretentious and philosophical were the two words I kept thinking through this book.

[jrendocrine at least reading is good]

I came into this book high on Parade, which I loved enough to read twice in succession, as it challenged me to think about art and artists in new ways. I chose to listen to Life of M on a streaming service, with RC reading it, because I was way back on the wait list of Cuskers at the library.

I was immediately disappointed and my mood didn't lift — RC’s narration comes off as self-indulgent and whiny. Starting with talking about her partner (=she is a real person), she then moves to “we” until the end of the book, when she is hurt - or worried that maybe she is doing the wrong thing with respect to the subject of M (M confronts her) - and becomes “I” with a partner again. I allied with M, close enough to N Portman for government work, and thought “we” was bitter and judgmental - of everyone, the rich gallery goers, the handsome waiters, the people picking up dog poop, the men urinating under the bridge. There was no sympathy for anyone.

And then … I started to get the whole “gaze” thing - this is how we view, these are the quick ways we feel about what we see. M appears to be this, but perhaps she is that. Is this true? Is this fiction? The passage that changed my almost dislike of RC/we was when M was intrigued by a young clerk in a bookstore who, she thought, looked almost like her twin, down to the way she held her face - and yet seemed unaffected by the world structured around the very famous, beautiful, sophisticated M. Then the clerk walks away and M notices that she has full hips and stocky legs. And the passage just stops. Drops like a bomb. Which was rather brilliant of RC.

I became more sympathetic to “we”, I became less judgmental, let it flow over me: the way we peons experience the world, the way the “elect” experience it, the gradations, the fabrication, the reality. No one can deny that Cusk is brilliant.

The last section, when M confronts the writer “I”, "I" backs away from the biography of it all into her assumed/preferred “this is a vehicle for whatever I want it to be”, was very intriguing. Here Cusk is fully back to what is art, and artistry.

And - as someone noted - the last line, delivered by M - is dizzying. Yikes.

Conclusion: I remain a Cusk fan.