Is Natalie Portman really the star of Rachel Cusk's Life of M? I read the book. It's something much weirder.
The buzz surrounding Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Life of M, has been loud. Many have painted the book as a brutal takedown of her famous friend, Natalie Portman. Readers and critics alike have spent weeks dissecting the supposed similarities between the actress and the protagonist, M. The internet has been quick to call it a literary assassination, eager to find real-life gossip hidden within the prose. But after reading the book, it is clear that those expecting a celebrity tell-all are going to be disappointed. The novel is not an expose on a movie star. It is something much more abstract and experimental.
Cusk is known for weaving her own experiences into fiction, and this work is no exception. From the very first page, the narrative hints that the account of M’s life is far from factual. The narrator even toys with the idea of writing an autobiography for M, despite having no access to her personal life. The book moves through a series of imagined settings and scenarios that feel more like projections of the narrator’s own anxieties than a profile of a public figure. Cusk seems less interested in the life of a celebrity and more interested in the nature of performance and identity itself.
As the story unfolds, the narrative voice shifts and experiments with perspective, eventually revealing that the narrator has been fabricating these scenes all along. By the final chapter, the illusion is explicitly dismantled. The character of M admits that the events described never happened. The narrator confesses that she created these scenarios based only on the films she had seen, not on any actual knowledge of Portman. The book serves as a reflection on the creative process and the desire to live inside the life of another person.
In the end, the novel operates as a hall of mirrors. It challenges the reader to question the authenticity of what they are reading. The final lines of the book even raise questions about the identity of the narrator herself, pushing the reader further away from a simple reading of the text. Confusing this work with a standard celebrity roman à clef misses the point of Cusk’s project entirely. It is a work of fiction that uses the specter of fame to examine the instability of the self.