Portman’s fame alienates her from true selfhood, Cusk writes. Credit: Getty
The actor Natalie Portman has long seemed more like a person who wants to brand herself as smart than like a person who is actually smart — and her decision to let her friend Rachel Cusk write a book about her seems to confirm this. Portman has read many Rachel Cusk books. She picked Parade, published in 2024, as the June selection for her Instagram book club. In 2022, she hosted a discussion with the writer upon publication of Cusk’s 11th novel, Second Place, and picked it for the book club as well. Yet no one in her right mind who understood Rachel Cusk’s work would allow her to write about her — at least, no one with a sense of self-preservation and a public image to protect.
Cusk is brilliant, but her skill has always been at reducing the human to the mathematical product of cold existential forces: the violent struggle between men and women; the primal wounds left by abuse; the emptiness at the heart of identity. In other words, obviously, a Cusk book about you is never going to be flattering.
Is this what happened? Chatter in New York literary circles says that Cusk’s upcoming novel, Life of M, is based on Cusk’s relationship with Portman. The novel, which will be published next month, is about a famous actress, M, and a nameless writer-friend’s project to chronicle her. M’s key biographical information is very similar to Portman’s. The actress’s dissatisfaction and betrayal at the finished product, as recorded in the final pages of the book, is also said to be true to life. If so, it’s ironic in the extreme, since the impossibility of identity itself — and thus of anything being, truly, “true to life” — is the book’s central theme, a fact that says more about Cusk than it ever could about Portman.
The author-character points this out to the angry actress, but to no avail.
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.” The writer-narrator goes on to explain that she met M in a bookstore (“M is interested in books”) and that “in addition to being a film star, she was the model for a major brand, and her image looked out everywhere, from shop windows and hoardings and the rain-streaked perspex of bus shelters.”
Portman, famously, pulled back from acting in order to attend Harvard from 1999 to 2003, following her casting in the Star Wars franchise. She runs a book club, and often posts book-selfies on Instagram — with a coy eye peeking around the cover of whatever she’s currently reading — so she is clearly “interested in books.” She is a global brand ambassador for Christian Dior, the face of the Miss Dior perfume since 2011; in an atomized media landscape, she is one of the few actresses whose faces still really are everywhere. The two characters live in an unnamed European capital with a central river, which could be Paris, where both Cusk and Portman reside, though the details are rendered in Cusk’s usual palette of flattening-neoliberal-global-dystopia: well-groomed men and women run along the river “like gods in the sun,” others “lived in tents beneath the stone bridges and brushed their teeth in the water fountains.”
Such material could be true of many stars, and the comparison is more pointed than this. The narrator tells us, also in the opening sequence, directly after an allusion to a book about a woman who was sexually abused as a child, that M became famous as a child, and that “the script of her first film originally included several scenes in which the child was shown wanting or inviting sexual interaction with the central male character.” The scenes were cut after M’s mother objected, Cusk writes.
Portman, famously, was catapulted to stardom by her turn in the 1994 Luc Besson film, Léon: The Professional, filmed when she was 11 and 12 years old. In that movie, before we see her face, the camera dwells lovingly on her skinny and formless child’s legs and thighs — a detail perhaps more shocking in 2026 than in 1994, but uncomfortable even in that era. The Professional’s plot is about Portman’s character’s Lolita-like (though unconsummated) relationship with an adult hitman, Léon, played by Besson stalwart Jean Reno. It’s a matter of public record that Portman’s mother demanded that more explicitly sexual material be cut from the script. Nonetheless, Portman’s beautiful baby-face and gangly body are lavishly sexualized by the camera, and Portman has called her adult relationship to the film “complicated.” She has also revealed that she was harassed and slut-shamed as a child after its success, which was traumatizing for her, an experience shared by M.
There is more. M claims in the novel’s final pages that the author-character has made her “identifiable,” yet “filled the book with things she herself didn’t recognize.” M says the book is full of factual errors, so many she gave up keeping track of them. She hasn’t been to the places the author describes or done the things the author says she has. “It isn’t you,” our narrator-author replies. “It isn’t anyone.” The portrait in the book is what anyone could have written, based on M’s publicly available work and biography.
The statement, of course, is that of a fictional character, and unless Portman does come forth to correct the record, the truth will never be known — nor can it really matter, except to Portman. Cusk is a slippery and layered writer, and has long trafficked in the roles and archetypes that plague even ordinary mortals. The exploration of a character who is explicitly playing herself, or is trying to, but has no real self underneath, as she characterizes M’s existence, would naturally be attractive to her. In her cosmology, it is a universal condition of the haute-bourgeoise. And a character whose “self” is an object or commodity also has rich Cuskian appeal. She has always seen us as vessels; M’s container is merely more valuable than most.
The resulting book is a feat, simpler and more direct than 2024’s Parade, with its multiple plot lines and experimental structure, but also more crystalline and just as complex beneath the surface. Cusk is also at her best with aphorism and insight here, always a strength of her work. For readers who have yet to fall in love with Cusk, this might be the book to start with.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the book also brims with juicy revelations about M’s psychology. It feels like we’re catching a glimpse of Portman. “M had told me that starring in a film as a child had immediately brought her childhood to an end,” the author-narrator recounts. This event, with its swirling undercurrents of sexual abuse, is a primal violence of a kind that the author also believes she has suffered, a violence that detaches both women from reality and their own identities. The writer is secure in her craft, but it becomes the actress’s healing quest “not to create, but to try to make her life seem more normal.” M occasionally picks up her own children from school; she goes to parties and talks to non-famous people; she reads the news with touching sincerity, as if it will teach her how to be human.
M wants to be real, but for her “there was nowhere to go back to. There was no dream country where the original self might one day be found.”
To anyone other than Cusk, it might seem cruel to dash M’s dreams of normality and selfhood. But a darker, more fascinating portrait of celebrity emerges, in which M is both bewildered perpetrator and victim. Yes, she lives in a cold, palatial house that is “like a big doll’s house, with her as a doll inside of it.” She attends meetings in gloriously expensive, ruthlessly designed rooms, takes vacations in equally luxurious faux-farmhouses, and goes to a spa that is “a stern and celestial oasis in the sky.” Everywhere doors are magically opened for her, conveniences are arranged, and she is served by people with “specialized roles,” there “to do M’s bidding.” Cusk’s penchant for satire of this nature — especially the embedded satire of the movie star with pretensions to reading — could not possibly have pleased the real-life Portman, if the behind-the-scenes speculation is true.
And M wants to live this way. She is secretly irritated when ugliness and inconvenience intrude on her environments: the farmhouse’s sick caretaker coughing, for example. When a visiting relative is hit by a car, and M has to supervise the recovery, it isn’t an opportunity for compassion and connection, but “an episode of primal confusion.” She finds listening to friends talk about themselves in cafés a little challenging, and so on. Still, we feel sorry for her, as the true extent of her alienation sinks in. The bodies of the homeless that litter the story begin to seem a metaphor for M herself.
It is one of Cusk’s regular narrative innovations to include in her works sections told in a choral “we” voice. Here, the “we” may be intended to represent the narrator and other writers like her, but it also may be intended to speak for herself and M, the pair of friends. In one of these sections, she speculates that “we” have lost the capacity to love — something about “our” separation from reality, or “our” awareness of the underlying truth that such separation is the basic human condition — prevents it. In this matrix, love is attached to the (naive, illusory) experience of the real. “We” are left with hatred. In a beautiful, terrifying passage, she writes about “our” longest love relationship, which ended in a “meticulous and detailed” hatred that appeared “to form a total condemnation of our character…. The hate felt like the stone or the pit that was left when all the fruit of love had been eaten.”
Cusk tends to land in such places: hatred, somehow, instead of love. The cold intellectualism with which she approaches the human seems to naturally produce this result. As an artist, she has never spared herself the bitter fruit of her own creation — including in several memoirs. M surely should not have expected anything else from the narrator. And if the result of the two women’s friendship is a very strong Cusk book indeed, everyone should be happy — including, if her art-appreciation is real, Natalie Portman.
