For weeks the chatter in publishing and Hollywood has orbited one question: is Rachel Cusk’s new novel a barely disguised, unflattering portrait of Natalie Portman? The book is out now, and the debate has only grown louder, with the BBC framing the fallout as a full-blown Hollywood scandal.
What Life of M is actually about
Life of M, released by Faber in the UK and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US, is billed by its publisher as a “blazing interrogation of fame, power, beauty and truth”. The slim, 183-page novel follows an unnamed writer who tells a famous movie actress, identified only as M, that she wants to write M’s autobiography. M agrees at first, then grows unhappy with the portrait taking shape.
The setup mirrors the controversy now swirling around the book in real life, in which a celebrated author appears to have drawn on a star’s biography without, according to reports, her blessing. Critics have noted the novel’s structure keeps flipping the question back on the reader about who is really being exposed.
The parallels that set off the frenzy
Speculation took off in July, when critic Valerie Stivers published an essay arguing the book was a dark portrait of Portman. Since then, readers have piled on the overlaps between M and the Oscar winner:
| Claimed parallel | What happens in the book | The real Portman fact |
|---|---|---|
| Childhood fame | M is a child actor in a film that “immediately brought her childhood to an end” | Portman was 11 when cast in 1994’s Leon: The Professional |
| Ballet | A starring role in a film about a girl chosen for a ballet | Her Oscar-winning turn in Black Swan |
| Pop survivor | A school-shooting survivor who becomes a pop star | Her role in Vox Lux |
| Perfume face | M fronts a major brand “wreathed in pink flowers of spring” | Portman has been the face of Miss Dior |
Both women live in Paris, the unnamed city where the novel is set, and Portman has twice chosen Cusk’s books for her online book club, once telling GQ she was “starstruck” to meet the author. That closeness is exactly why the reported rupture stings, and it feeds the question of whether the friendship was ever as warm as it looked.
What Portman and Cusk say
Portman has stayed publicly quiet, but people around her have not. Vanity Fair reported that her friends are “pretty enraged” at a depiction they say shares little with the real woman beyond her resume, while an unnamed “insider” told the Daily Mail that Portman is “horrified” at any suggestion she was in on the project.
Cusk, for her part, has been coy and at times defensive. In an interview with The New York Times she called the tabloid frenzy “very stressful”, said whether M is based on a real person “is not really the point,” and insisted Life of M “isn’t a scandal or a subject for gossip.” Her publisher reportedly leaned into the mystery rather than dispelling it.
More than celebrity gossip
Strip away the name-dropping and Life of M is really about celebrity as a condition, with M as an avatar for how fame hollows out a person’s inner life. It is territory Cusk has circled before in her acclaimed Outline trilogy of autofiction, and it makes her a repeated lightning rod: the first print run of her 2009 book The Last Supper had to be pulped after people recognized themselves in it and threatened legal action.
For Portman, it is not the first time she has been turned into an unwilling literary muse, a thread that runs through the coverage alongside this year’s broader wave of stars fighting to control their own narratives, from Miley Cyrus dropping her surname to rebrand to publicists pushing back on unflattering portrayals.
What the critics think
Reviews have been decidedly mixed. The Guardian called Life of M “a book to admire enormously, but not one to love”, while The New York Times and The New Yorker were cooler still. The Telegraph went furthest in the other direction, branding it a “literary assassination” of Portman.
Love it or hate it, the novel has already become one of the most discussed books of the year, the kind of book-buzz moment that reminds you how hungry audiences still are for a story they can argue about, whether in a Western literary capital or in the Philippine book-festival circuit. Whether M is Portman, a composite, or pure invention, Cusk seems to have gotten exactly the reaction a novelist who probes fame would want: everyone is talking.
