Rachel Cusk, the British writer best known for her autofictional novels and unsparing books on motherhood, divorce and female identity, opens her latest novel, Life of M with a wonderful little trap. An unnamed writer, clearly a Cusk-like figure, tells M, a famous actor, that she wants to write her autobiography. M seems game. “Would you just make it up?” she asks. It is a funny line, but also a dangerous one. It gives the writer permission to invent, distort, enter and occupy. That permission, and the cost of using it, becomes the real story of this slim, brilliant and morally uneasy novel.
There has been a great deal of literary chatter around the 147-page work, partly because of the air of scandal around it and partly because many readers have connected M with Natalie Portman. The parallels are hard to miss. Cusk does little to disguise them. M is a film star, a mother, a reader, a luxury-brand face, a woman whose image is everywhere. She became famous as a child after playing a young girl in a film about a troubling relationship with an older man. Her mother had some of the more sexualised scenes removed from the script. After the film came out, children at school called M a “slut”.
Years later, M plays a ballerina who starves and punishes herself in pursuit of perfection. The role brings her the greatest acclaim of her career. She also appears in a film about a school-shooting survivor who becomes a pop star. M lives in Paris, has children, loves books and models for a luxury brand. The references point unmistakably to Léon: The Professional, Black Swan and Vox Lux; the brand, too, looks a lot like Dior. M is, in other words, very close to Portman. But to read Life of M only as a roman-à-clef is to miss what Cusk is really examining: our hunger to know, name and interpret another person so completely that we begin to mistake our version of her for the truth.
{{/usCountry}}Years later, M plays a ballerina who starves and punishes herself in pursuit of perfection. The role brings her the greatest acclaim of her career. She also appears in a film about a school-shooting survivor who becomes a pop star. M lives in Paris, has children, loves books and models for a luxury brand. The references point unmistakably to Léon: The Professional, Black Swan and Vox Lux; the brand, too, looks a lot like Dior. M is, in other words, very close to Portman. But to read Life of M only as a roman-à-clef is to miss what Cusk is really examining: our hunger to know, name and interpret another person so completely that we begin to mistake our version of her for the truth.
{{/usCountry}}The narrator is both fascinated and unsettled by her. “It was hard not to feel ugly next to M,” she says early on. The narrator’s ugliness is the ugliness of ordinary life, of having been hurt, disappointed, aged and damaged in the usual human ways. M’s damage is different for she has been turned into an image before she could fully become a person. For those of us attuned to the celeb phenomenon, this world is familiar. We know too well what happens when stars become public property. Their children, marriages, faces, clothes, piety, politics, and airport appearances all become fodder for gossip and collective judgement. Cusk gives us a peek inside that world, showing the loneliness and the spiritual hollowness underneath.
Formally, Life of M belongs to the experimental phase of Cusk’s work. The social comedy of Saving Agnes and The Country Life feels far away, as does the open domestic combat of A Life’s Work and Aftermath, though questions of motherhood, resentment, female sacrifice and self-erasure still run through the book. After the Outline trilogy, Cusk began to write fiction in which the narrator often withdraws, listens, observes and takes apart the old devices of plot and character. Second Place and, more radically, Parade pushed this further.
In Parade, her 2024 Goldsmiths Prize-winning novel, different artists, all of whom go by their initial G, are part of a broken, abstract structure that thinks about art, violence, female identity and the loss of the self. Life of M continues that project, but makes the problem more public: what if the “character” being dismantled is not anonymous but famous? It can be seen in the tradition of recent novels like Olivia Laing’s Crudo (which combines Laing’s own life with the persona of the late punk writer Kathy Acker) and Benjamín Labatut’s The MANIAC (based on the life of the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann), which borrow from real lives without becoming straight biography. But Cusk’s new novel feels more immediate because it brings her cool, searching method into the recognisable world of film, fame and public fascination.
The novel is narrated as a sequence of scenes: M at a school gate, at a spa, on a boat, in a staged literary salon, in an interview, in a small cinema watching one of her own films. These episodes are interrupted by the narrator’s meditations on hospitals, dogs, cities, tourists, work, memory, children, love and the body. At times, the method is hypnotic. At other times, it can feel cumbersome.
When M lands major roles, a whole new world opens which brings the prestige, luxury campaigns, bodyguards, private spas, plush houses. Wherever she goes, reality rearranges itself around her. Doors unlock, waiters hurry, and people become obliging. But Cusk is not interested in fame as glamour or privilege as comfort, but both as a kind of exile. M has access to everything except ordinariness.
The best passages are about films. Cusk sees cinema as a moral solvent, a machine that compresses time and makes cruelty consumable. “Life was easier if you watched films,” the narrator observes. M, who has lived inside this machine since childhood, understands performance as both salvation and injury. A theatre director tells her that film is obscene because it simulates life.
But theatre, with its nightly demand for presence, frightens her. She does not want to be trapped in reality. There are brilliant set-pieces: the fashion-brand “salon” that converts literature into luxury content; the school-gate scene where M talks to a young nanny and recognises beauty, vulnerability and class distance all at once; the interview in which a sympathetic male journalist reframes child acting as abuse.
Cusk is unsparing about the terms on which a famous woman’s body is allowed to circulate in the world. A perfume contract, for instance, is not treated as a glamorous accessory to stardom, but as another little economy of value, where the woman lends her face, beauty and aura and still suspects the man beside her is being paid more. M’s appearance has to look effortless, almost untouched, even though it is kept that way through discipline, styling and constant correction.
What makes the novel more unsettling is that Cusk also turns this scrutiny back on the book itself. Late in the novel, M objects to the narrator’s version of her, saying she has been made to seem without humanity, unable to love. That scene changes the terms of what we have been reading. Until then, Life of M can appear to be doing precisely what it condemns: turning a woman into an instrument for someone else’s intelligence.
In the final pages, Cusk makes that discomfort part of the design. The narrator admits that writing M has allowed her to escape her own life after her partner’s near-death. M has been less a subject than a host body. The “autobiography” was never simply about M. It was about the writer’s need to inhabit, consume and abandon her.
For readers coming fresh to Cusk, this may not be the easiest entry point. That would be Outline (the first novel in the trilogy that dives into grief, identity, and transformation through the life of Faye, a British writer and mother navigating divorce, and includes Transit and Kudos) hands down. But Life of M has a sharper contemporary hook. It understands our moment of parasocial intimacy and moral performance. It asks why we believe visibility is power when it may also be captivity. It stays with you because it catches something true about the age of images. To be seen by everyone, Cusk suggests, may be another way of disappearing.
Nawaid Anjum is an independent journalist, translator and poet. He lives in New Delhi.