Cusk's Portman-Based Novel Joins the Biogossip Canon — SkimNews
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- Rachel Cusk's novel Life of M includes a breakout film described as having 'immediately brought her childhood to an end' — a clear reference to Natalie Portman's role in Léon: The Professional, in which she was cast at age 11
- Page Six dubbed Cusk's novel a 'literary scandal,' and rumors that Portman is unhappy with her portrayal have trickled down to tabloids, despite the article arguing the displeasure is hard to glean from the book itself
- The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger sold to Doubleday for around $250,000 in 2002, per Women's Wear Daily, and Anna Wintour finally embraced the joke earlier this year for the sequel film after years of deflecting questions about the Miranda Priestly character
- Lisa Halliday's 2018 debut Asymmetry was hailed by the New Yorker for offering the 'voyeuristic thrill' of imagining a relationship with a man resembling Philip Roth, whom Halliday had dated — with the magazine likening the prose to Cusk's
- Cusk strips away the brand-name signifiers that fuel typical biogossip (no Prada, no Diet Coke), instead deploying 'we' throughout the novel to implicate readers in collective parasocial obsession with fame
- Cusk was previously ripped by the British press after her 2001 memoir A Life's Work, accused of child-hating and epitomizing a crisis of feminism, and later said the criticism upset her but did not challenge her understanding of literature
Why it matters: The biogossip genre can propel literary fiction beyond newspaper book review sections and onto gossip blog homepages — a cross-genre commercial lift Cusk appears to be courting even as she denies readers the juicy details that drove predecessors like The Devil Wears Prada. Her gamble is that stripping away recognizable signifiers and weaponizing 'we' will be read as moral critique rather than cold refusal.
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