The book arrived last week already burdened by expectation. Cusk is one of contemporary fiction’s most provocative names, and her publisher promised “a blazing interrogation of fame, power, beauty and truth.” But anticipation tipped into full-blown scandal in July, when culture journalist Valerie Stivers wrote in Unherd that the novel was “a dark portrait of Natalie Portman” and that the actress was unhappy with the result.
How the Portman Connection Surfaced
Life of M opens with a nameless, genderless writer recounting a conversation: “A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea.” Much later, M pushes back: “I don’t like the way you portray me… Actually, it’s hurtful.”
Whether such an exchange ever took place between Cusk and Portman is unknown. Both women live in Paris and their paths have crossed. Portman has twice picked Cusk’s novels for her book club, interviewed the author publicly, and said she is “forever in awe of Rachel Cusk and the way she disrupts form and the conventions of storytelling.” Yet a source told Vanity Fair the two have never had “much of a relationship at all.”
The parallels in the text, though, are hard to ignore. Cusk’s M found fame as a child actress opposite an older male co-star in a film that “immediately brought her childhood to an end” — a description that tracks closely with Portman’s 1994 breakout, Léon: The Professional. M is also the face of a major fragrance brand, appearing in ads “wreathed in the pink flowers of spring,” a detail that points toward Portman’s long-running Miss Dior campaign. M’s filmography includes a troubled prima ballerina and a school-shooting survivor turned pop star, mirroring Portman’s roles in Black Swan and Vox Lux.
A Character Built to Discomfort
Cusk herself has been coy. Asked by the New York Times whether M is based on a real person, she replied that the question “is not really the point.” That deflection has done nothing to quiet the chatter.
Portman has stayed silent, but Vanity Fair reported disquiet in her camp, noting: “Her friends are pretty enraged as the depiction of M has so little resemblance to Natalie outside of the résumé.” The Telegraph went further, calling the book “a literary assassination” of Portman.
The character of M is not designed to be liked. She is charming on the surface but condescending, detached, and preoccupied with appearance. When M meets a sales assistant who resembles her facially but has a larger body, she spends the rest of the day brooding on “the full hips and the pair of sturdy legs that would have altered her destiny.” Her attempts to stay tethered to ordinary life are, the narrator makes clear, futile.
Crucially, the novel signals from its first page that everything readers learn about M is filtered through the unnamed writer. Cusk seems to be daring the audience to project a narrative onto both the fictional actress and the real one — and then to confront why they do it.
Cusk’s Long History of Provocation
None of this is new territory for Cusk. Since publishing her first book in 1993, she has built 16 more and a reputation for unsparing prose that dissects human frailty with clinical precision.
Her memoirs have drawn the loudest fire. A Life’s Work (2001), her brutal account of early motherhood as a “sort of compound fenced off from the rest of the world,” caused uproar at the time but is now credited with opening space for women to write honestly about parenting. The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (2009) had to be pulped after a man she met on holiday recognised himself and sued over the unflattering portrait. Aftermath, her 2012 divorce memoir, drew a Sunday Times review branding her “a peerless narcissist.”
The backlash pushed Cusk toward what she called a “creative death.” Traditional memoir felt impossible — “I could not do it without being misunderstood and making people angry” — and fiction struck her as “fake and embarrassing.” Her solution was autofiction, the hybrid form that dissolves the line between the invented and the lived, and it produced her most celebrated work to date, the Outline Trilogy.
What Happens Next
Life of M is likely to keep generating headlines for months. Portman has not publicly commented, and whether she ever breaks that silence will shape how the story ages. If her camp continues to push back through off-record sources, the novel’s reception will increasingly be framed as a celebrity dispute rather than a literary event — which may suit Cusk’s themes perfectly.
The book also lands at a moment when autofiction itself is under fresh scrutiny, with readers and critics asking where the boundary lies between artistic transformation and exploitation of a real person’s life. Cusk has spent a career testing that line. Life of M may be the test that finally forces the wider conversation.
For now, the novel stands as both a work of fiction and a cultural flashpoint — exactly the kind of double life Cusk has always courted.
— Lucas Berg, culture desk, AXO News