Rachel Cusk, left, and the apparent inspiration for her latest novel, Natalie Portman STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP via Getty Images/Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images) The acclaimed writer Rachel Cusk’s controversial new novel Life of M is an intimate, unvarnished character study of an A-list movie star who is depicted as hollow, immature and cynical, an intellectual poseur and an artist wannabe. The apparent inspiration: Natalie Portman, who selected Cusk’s works for her online book club and hosted her for a 2022 discussion, calling the author “one of my favorite writers.” Among the evidence is the fictional subject’s filmography, whose details directly map to the actress’ signature roles in Leon: The Professional, Black Swan and Vox Lux.
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In the novel, publishing Aug. 25, an unnamed writer in an unnamed city that appears to be Paris undertakes an experimental autobiographical project — essayistic, possibly fabulist — about a friend, the titular M. In part, it’s an extended riff on the celebrity profile, with scenes set at discreet restaurants and in luxury hotels.
“To always be playing a part is to have no home, she thinks, nor any history,” Cusk writes of M. The star’s literal home is compared to “a big doll’s house, with her as the doll inside it.” Cusk writes of M that “she is skilled at giving the appearance of paying attention,” and “her cultivation of normality is an attempt to retrieve a lost inner world.”
Courtesy of Macmillan Early buzz about the book has been portentous, turning its release into one of the high-low cultural events of the year. The zeitgeist-attuned pop culture critic Hunter Harris wrote a column headlined: “Does Natalie Portman Have A Bad Art Friend?” The book reviewer Valerie Stivers, in an assessment which judged Life of M a “dark portrait,” opined that “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.” (Despite this repeated presumption of friendship, there’s no evidence that the actress and the author are more than acquaintances.) The former New York Times staff book critic Molly Young noted she’d “heard through the publishing grapevine that there was an ‘insane’ legal situation” surrounding the book. “Was unable to obtain specifics about the nature of the insanity but believe me, I tried.”
It’s rare for an avant-garde novel to become tabloid fodder. “Natalie is a very private person, that’s why she moved to Paris, so Rachel’s book, Life of M, has really pissed her off,” an anonymous “insider” told the Daily Mail, adding, “She thinks it is a real low blow and is horrified about the rumors she was in on the book in some way, which she certainly was not. The celebrity is nothing like her, she is far from a diva, she is a quiet bookworm.”
Neither Portman nor Cusk and her publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux would comment for this story. An industry executive who has long known the actress tells The Hollywood Reporter that the book is “undeniably a description of the public actress known as Natalie Portman. But the personality and character of M bears zero resemblance to the person of Natalie Portman. If you asked anybody who knows her they’d say the same.” This person continues, “They’ve never been friends. Natalie’s a fan. They are both in those highbrow circles in Paris. They’ve met each other a handful of times in total. The publisher would want people to believe they are close and that Rachel observed her for years. But it’s fiction.”
The meta story of Life of M’s creation — how Cusk ignored decorum in favor of artistic absolutism — is perhaps the most intriguing element of this saga. Especially since Cusk has a well-known record of literary incitement. “How could someone of Natalie Portman’s sophistication not be more on her guard around Rachel Cusk?” asks Leigh Gilmore, an English professor at Ohio State University who’s a scholar of life writing and feminist theory. “How does that happen?”
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Portman, 45, is the Hollywood movie star of her generation with perhaps the most cosmopolitan public persona. She’s a Harvard graduate, a face of Dior, a longtime Parisian due to her former marriage to the accomplished French ballet director Benjamin Millepied, with whom she has two children. Then there’s her studious hosting of Natalie’s Book Club (190,000 members on Instagram), whose picks lean higher brow, from the classic like Carson McCullers to the contemporary: Helen DeWitt, Benjamin Labatut, Rachel Kushner. She’s one of several actresses — among them Emma Roberts and Kaia Gerber — whose outward bookishness have turned them into tastemakers among publishers.
Portman’s pas de deux with Cusk is a sequel of sorts to a much-documented episode a decade ago. The literary world concluded that the celebrated novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, then married to another noted writer, had fallen in love with his longtime friend Portman, who didn’t return his affection. (They’d first met after she’d attended one of his readings.) The situation became material for a 2023 Off-Broadway play, The Wanderers, in which Katie Holmes portrayed the Portman-esque character.
In Life of M, Cusk’s stand-in feels reduced in her proximity to the movie star. But in real life, the 59-year-old Cusk — an international literary celebrity, brimming with gravitas — has her own formidable pull. While M grants permission for the narrator to proceed in the book (“She liked the idea. She’s a good sport.”), it’s unclear if Portman did the same. If so, Portman may have been seduced and betrayed by the thrall of literary prestige in a grand tradition that famously felled Truman Capote’s society swans, including Babe Paley, when he published Answered Prayers.
Cusk, a Canadian-Brit educated at Oxford, has long been laureled and condemned for her ruthless chronicles of selfhood. She’s known for a focus on the pressures and sacrifices of artistic women.
“Cusk uses aspects of her own life — and perhaps by extension, the lives of others — as templates for exploring questions of importance relating, broadly speaking, to female experience over the life course,” explains Fiona J. Doloughan, an English professor at The Open University in the United Kingdom who has authored a book which examines how Cusk has reinvented the novel.
Cusk’s work has previously led to trouble. Her 2009 memoir The Last Supper, about a summer spent in Italy, resulted in a libel suit. “They withdrew the book in England,” she told Elle. “The American edition got lawyered to death,” adding that those she offended “see themselves where they are not, and they don’t view themselves where they are.” To The Guardian, she explained, “if you describe people and they recognize themselves they can sue.”
Still, three years later she published another memoir, Aftermath, about the collapse of her marriage, which provoked a backlash over the belief that it violated the privacy of her husband and children. The “creative death” she says she experienced from its vitriolic reception led her to follow it with a landmark, widely praised cycle of novels known as the Outline Trilogy. It’s written in the postmodern genre called autofiction, in which autobiography is fictionalized to prioritize psychological and philosophical truths over literal facts. The choice also, not incidentally, is a bulwark against litigation.
Hywel Dix, an English professor and autofiction scholar at the U.K.’s Bournemouth University, traces the rise of the literary genre over the past few decades in part as a response to reality television and true crime documentaries. “Everyone is now more skeptical of what is scripted,” he says. “When that happens, we begin to question the truth content of these purported ‘truth’ narratives.”
The literature professor Arnaud Schmitt at University of Pau in France sees Life of M as both “a direct continuation of [Cusk’s] examination of reality, as well as a drastic change,” because it’s biofiction. “This is an imagining of someone else’s life,” he says. “It’s what Joyce Carol Oates did with Blonde,” her lauded burrowing into the soul of Marilyn Monroe.
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Life of M culminates with a confrontation between M and the writer, who recalls, “I showed M some of what only I was referring to as our project” — the narrative so far. “She didn’t seem to like it all that much. She said we needed to talk.” Then Cusk sketches a showdown:
I don’t like the way you portray me, she said. Actually, it’s hurtful. But it isn’t you, I said. It isn’t anyone. She looked at me coldly. You’ve made it seem like I lack humanity, she said. You’ve made it seem like I’m unable to love. But you’re just playing a character, I said. The character was invented by me. So if that’s true, then it’s me it’s true of.
The narrator adds, “I don’t know anything about your private life … I don’t know anything about your character.” This doesn’t allay M: “Obviously you can do what you want, she said. But I don’t want you using my name.” Cusk and Portman didn’t respond to THR’s inquiries about whether the author had sought the actress’ approval before embarking on Life of M or showed her the manuscript before publication.
Gilmore, the life writing scholar, observes, “the novel wants to assert the innocence of the artist. The artist wants to not be held responsible for any harm that could come to any real person from this endeavor. [Cusk] indemnifies herself as an artist on the grounds of art.”
Mark Stephens, a top British solicitor who specializes in international defamation and privacy law, calls this disclaiming passage “a brilliant device,” adding, “it would be difficult to bring home a successful case [against the book], and Natalie Portman would bring the author the benefit of the Streisand Effect,” referring to the backfiring phenomenon in which an attempt to remove information from the public domain instead amplifies it.
The consensus among libel experts is that Portman wouldn’t win in American court. “In the U.S., this is almost impossible to prevail,” says Samantha Barbas, a law historian at the University of Iowa with a focus on free speech. Yet the actress may have a much stronger shot in France, where both she and Cusk reside. This might explain why, despite Life of M already forthcoming in the U.K. and Germany, a French edition has yet to be announced. (Cusk has long published in France and become a major cultural figure in the country, receiving the government’s prestigious Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.)
“There’s much stronger privacy protections in France, and a lot of cases where famous people receive injunctions where they haven’t [in the U.S.],” explains Jacqueline Lipton, a literary agent and law professor at Duquesne University. Adds Marc Randazza, a prominent U.S. free speech attorney, with a laugh: “You breathe the wrong way and you can be guilty of defamation in France.” This may be overstated, but Scarlett Johansson, then residing in the country, won a 2014 decision in French court against a French author who, in a novel, depicted a Johansson doppelganger as carrying out multiple affairs.
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Cusk scholars — yes, it’s a whole field of study — defend her and Life of M. “It’s a speculation on 21st-century fame, and how it feels on a subjective level,” says Roberta Garrett, a senior lecturer at the University of East London who has published a book on her work. “Cusk is simply not a sentimental writer.” Melissa Schuh, a lecturer at Germany’s Kiel University who has also written on the author, similarly argues that Life of M “reflects how character is performed.” The book, she says, asks whether it is “even possible to write about another person and portray them accurately at all.”
Still, Cusk appears alert to the ethics of Life of M within the text itself. She describes a screenwriter friend of the actress who has written a film script about a figure “who bears more than a little resemblance to M herself,” with “the horrifying difference” that the character is “a sort of emotionless automaton,” the purpose of which is to “interrogate the notion of celebrity — and thus of self.” This friend hopes M might star in the project. Instead, she’s repelled. “He thinks he is dignifying her fundamental powerlessness,” Cusk writes of the screenwriter. “But in fact it is to this empty and passionless alter ego that she will never surrender.”
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