Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Life of M, is being read as a book with Natalie Portman in its shadow. Readers have linked the novel’s central figure to the actress after spotting echoes that feel too specific to ignore, and the discussion has returned Cusk to a familiar question: how thin can the line be between fiction and a real life?
The reason the novel is being searched now is simple. Portman selected Cusk’s Parade for her book club in 2024, and the two have been friendly for several years, with at least one warm public discussion between them. That history has made Life of M feel less like an abstract literary puzzle and more like a story about two well-known women whose connection was already public before the new novel arrived.
Valerie Strivers described Life of M as a book about a famous actress, M, and a nameless writer-friend’s project to chronicle her. In that account, M is a film star and the model for a major brand who lives in an unnamed European city, began her career as a child in a Lolita-like role in a European film, and later played a ballerina in one of her better-known parts. Strivers also said the novel presents M as tense, myopic, alienated, and not so great in a crisis, which is why readers have read the book as pointing toward Natalie Portman, a famous actress and Dior model who lives in Paris and whose first project was described in the same way.
That is also where the friction sits. Portman’s representatives have not directly commented on the rumors, and Cusk has not directly commented either. At the same time, background sources have tried to soften the connection by recasting the relationship as business acquaintances, even though the public record points to something warmer. The result is a gap between what people are willing to say out loud and what readers think the novel is doing on the page.
Cusk has been here before. In 2009, the first run of The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy was pulped after The Times said she did not sufficiently disguise the people she wrote about and that she was threatened with a lawsuit for breach of privacy. In 2017, Damian Barr said he was the unhappy inspiration for a character in Transit, and in 2018 Cusk told The New Yorker, “I don’t think character exists anymore.” Life of M fits that record closely enough that the current speculation is unlikely to fade quickly, especially because the question is no longer whether readers are imagining a link but how exact that link really is.
If Life of M is not a direct portrait of Natalie Portman, it is close enough to keep pulling her name into the conversation. And if it is, Cusk has written another novel that tests how much real life can be disguised before the disguise stops mattering.
