A Fictional Actress Named M, and a Real One Named Natalie
Rachel Cusk’s forthcoming novel Life of M centers on a famous actress named M – a Dior model, a Paris resident, a former child star whose first major role bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Lolita, and a woman who once danced ballet on screen in one of her most recognized films. Natalie Portman is a famous actress, a Dior model, a Paris resident, a former child star, and the lead of Black Swan. The overlap is not subtle, and literary readers have not been quiet about noticing it.
Valerie Strivers broke down the parallels in a detailed read for UnHerd, tracking the novel’s architecture against Portman’s biography point by point. Portman selected Cusk’s 2024 novel Parade for her book club, and the two have had at least one warm public exchange. That apparent friendship makes the fictional portrait all the more charged – particularly because M, as Strivers describes her, does not come off especially well.
What the Book Actually Says
Life of M is structured around a nameless writer-narrator who chronicles the life of M, framing it as a literary project. It engages with ideas Cusk has been building toward for years – the instability of the self, the way identity buckles under observation. These are not new preoccupations for her. What is new is the degree to which this particular subject seems to have a street address.
M is described as tense, alienated, struggling to connect with people outside the hermetic world of celebrity. She is, the narrator suggests, not at her best when things go wrong. And then there is the origin story: M’s breakthrough came through a European film in which she played a child in a Lolita-like role – one the narrator says “immediately brought her childhood to an end.” Portman’s first film role was in Léon: The Professional, directed by Luc Besson, in 1994. She was twelve.
The novel’s final pages, according to Strivers, depict the actress’s dissatisfaction with the finished manuscript – her sense of betrayal at what the narrator has produced. Background sources close to Portman have reportedly sought to reframe the relationship between Cusk and Portman as professional rather than personal, downgrading them from friends to business acquaintances. Portman’s representatives have not issued any direct public comment.
Cusk, for her part, has also said nothing specific. She rarely does. Her public persona runs on precision and restraint, and she has spent the better part of a decade making a literary case against conventional character-building. “I don’t think character exists anymore,” she told The New Yorker in 2018 – a position that becomes considerably more complicated when the people in your pages are identifiable enough to hire lawyers.
Cusk Has Been Here Before
This is not, in fact, the first time Cusk has been accused of writing too close to the bone. The first print run of her 2009 novel The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy was pulped after she was threatened with a lawsuit for breach of privacy – the people she had written about were not sufficiently disguised. In 2017, memoirist Damian Barr publicly identified himself as the unhappy model for a character in Transit. The current situation follows a pattern that has followed Cusk across her later career: the closer she gets to what she calls truth, the more recognizable her human material becomes.
Her Outline trilogy, which made her an international literary figure, stripped away nearly everything novelists traditionally use to create distance from life – plot, dramatic invention, interior monologue. What remained was observation: acute, unsettling, barely fictionalized. The style was widely praised. It was also, for anyone who knew the people being described, a different kind of experience entirely.
Portman, Twice the Subject
What gives this story an additional layer is that Portman has been in this position before. This is not the first time she has found herself on the receiving end of a writer’s intense attention – a fact that writer Hunter Harris flagged in a recent episode of her podcast Hung Up, raising the question of whether Portman has what might be called a Bad Art Friend situation on her hands. Or possibly two.
The phrase “Bad Art Friend” entered literary discourse in 2021 via a New York Times story about a writer who allegedly used the experiences of a friend – without consent – as source material. The scenario stuck in the cultural memory because it made explicit something writers rarely acknowledge: that proximity to one is not the same as safety from one. Portman, who by all accounts cultivated a genuine relationship with Cusk’s work before this novel arrived, may be finding that out in real time.
There is also the question of what Life of M ultimately is – a novel, a chronicle, an act of literary appropriation, or some combination of all three. Cusk has argued for years that conventional fiction falsifies experience, that the invented character is a kind of lie. If she now writes about real people with their serial numbers only lightly filed off, she is not abandoning that position so much as following it to its logical destination.
Portman’s camp is quiet. Cusk’s camp is quieter. The novel has not yet been released to the general public, which means the full shape of M – how she is rendered, how she ends, what the narrator ultimately thinks of her – is still largely unknown outside the pages Strivers has described. What is already clear is that someone who once chose Cusk’s novel for a book club is now, reportedly, displeased with the book that came back.
