Rachel Cusk's 'Life of M': Portman Portrait, or Hers?
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- Rachel Cusk's new novel "Life of M" is widely believed to depict Natalie Portman — both women live in Paris, and described roles in the novel map onto Portman's "Black Swan" and "Vox Lux."
- After her 2012 divorce memoir "Aftermath" was excoriated, Cusk told The Guardian the experience was "creative death" and left her "heading into total silence," prompting her pivot into the autofictional "Outline" trilogy (2014 onward) with its passive narrator, Faye.
- Earlier autobiographical works drew sharp consequences: "A Life's Work" (2001) was lambasted by the British press for its maternal self-abnegation, and "The Last Supper" (2009) prompted a libel suit the publisher settled with a revised edition.
- "Life of M" uses distinctive French-inflected openings like "It is a hotel room in a foreign city" and deploys recurring first-person-plural passages meditating on identity before the narrator disappears until the final confrontation with M.
- The book's closing pages stage a scene in which M rejects the portrait as hurtful, and the narrator concedes she has projected her own "private interior world" — telling M, "if that's true, then it's me it's true of."
- Janet Malcolm's 1990 book "The Journalist and the Murderer" frames the article's central question: does the same ethical indictment of nonfiction writers apply to autofiction's use of real people as material?
Why it matters: Cusk's novel collapses subject and author: she writes a book widely seen as about Natalie Portman, then has the narrator tell M the portrait is really a projection of the writer's own 'private interior world.' The move tests whether autofiction's framing holds when readers can easily identify the 'character' — a question her 'Aftermath' reception already showed her.
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