Cusk's 'Life of M' Confronts Its Famous Subject — SkimNews
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- Rachel Cusk's new novel Life of M centers on a famous actress believed to be modeled on Natalie Portman, with details matching Portman's life: a child star, Paris residence, roles in Black Swan and Vox Lux, and a book club that has featured Cusk's writing.
- The book's structure splits between detailed descriptions of M's daily life—rendered with screenplay-like detachment—and first-person-plural interludes that probe the shared experience of being a well-known woman, with 'ugly' and 'ugliness' appearing nearly 30 times across 180 pages.
- Cusk's history of controversial autobiographical writing is detailed: her 2001 A Life's Work was attacked for its frank take on motherhood, The Last Supper (2009) triggered a libel suit (settled by the publisher), and her 2012 divorce memoir Aftermath drew such backlash that Cusk called it 'creative death' in a Guardian interview.
- After Aftermath, Cusk pivoted to fiction with her Outline trilogy (2014 onward), featuring a passive narrator named Faye who serves as a vehicle for other people's stories—a form that offered more legal protection than memoir while pursuing 'the resonance of pure reality.'
- In Life of M's final pages, M confronts the author, saying 'It's hurtful' and noting she never visited the places or did the things narrated; the author argues the portrait is her own 'private interior world' refracted through M, replying 'if that's true, then it's me it's true of.'
- Janet Malcolm's 1990 The Journalist and the Murderer is invoked to frame the ethical questions autofiction raises, with the article quoting her line that 'every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is indefensible.'
Why it matters: Cusk has spent her career testing the limits of what fiction can borrow from real life, and *Life of M* sharpens that question by targeting a globally recognizable subject. The book's final turn—suggesting the portrait was always about the author, not M—recasts the entire autofiction enterprise as confession in disguise, putting Cusk's ethical stance toward her subjects back in public view.
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