The Blurred Lines of Celebrity Fiction
Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Life of M, hits shelves on August 25, 2026, and it arrives with significant baggage. Early reports from outlets such as UnHerd suggested the book functions as a thinly veiled portrait of Natalie Portman. The protagonist, M, is an actress who began her career as a child star in a movie reminiscent of Leon: The Professional. The parallels continue with references to a ballet film akin to Black Swan and an international lifestyle that places M in elite literary circles. Cusk attempts to preempt these comparisons by opening the novel with a scene where the author tells M of her plan to write an autobiography.
Still, the execution leaves much to be desired. Cusk presents a narrative of fame-induced dissociation, where M is trapped behind the glass of her own public image. The character moves through antiseptic, white-walled rooms while feeling completely removed from the reality experienced by ordinary people. While the prose is sharp, the internal life of M feels hollow. The author relies on heavy-handed metaphors about the nature of celebrity that fail to offer fresh insight. By the time M contemplates her distance from humanity, the reader is left feeling more like an intruder than a witness to a genuine character study.
Stylistic Choices and Narrative Voids
Cusk remains committed to her signature style of stripping away traditional plot structures. Life of M contains very little dialogue, creating an out-of-time quality that often feels stagnant. In place of character interaction, the reader gets long stretches of M drifting through time zones and observing the lives of others with a mix of revulsion and pity. The narrator, who occasionally refers to themselves as a "we," often feels like a stand-in for the author herself. This creates an uncomfortable friction, especially when the text tries to grapple with the lives of people outside the protagonist’s rarefied circle.
Observations on pigeons or the nature of democracy often interrupt the flow of the book. These segments feel designed to highlight the narrator’s estrangement from common sense, yet they frequently devolve into unintentional comedy. Cusk’s refusal to use proper nouns for things like EMDR therapy feels like an affectation rather than a structural choice. The text seems caught between its desire to be a serious examination of fame and its tendency to descend into petty, personal grievances. The result is a book that feels trapped by its own pretension.
The Cost of Artistic Cruelty
Observers familiar with Cusk’s work have long noted her penchant for using real-life acquaintances as fodder for her fiction. The 2009 memoir The Last Supper was famously pulped after subjects threatened legal action. Life of M continues this pattern of behavior, leading some critics to characterize Cusk’s approach as inherently cruel. The novel is filled with petty gossip disguised as high art. M’s interactions with a former partner are portrayed with a coldness that feels less like artistic detachment and more like a personal settling of scores.
Perhaps the most telling aspect of the book is its preoccupation with the physical details of a room. The final scene, which details the exact moldings and curtains of a drawing room, suggests the author is more interested in cataloging the surroundings than in finding a narrative climax. Whether or not Natalie Portman was the intended target of this work remains a secondary question to the quality of the prose itself. As a piece of literature, Life of M struggles to justify its own existence outside of the external drama surrounding its release. It is a cautionary tale of what happens when a writer prioritizes their own projections over the humanity of their subjects.