This summer, Canadian-British novelist Rachel Cusk achieved something rare for a writer of literary fiction: attention in the Hollywood trades. Rumour had it that Cusk, who has been decorated with critical acclaim and nominations for the Booker Prize and the Governor General’s Award, wrote her new novel, “Life of M,” as a thinly veiled portrait of Natalie Portman — and not a flattering one.
It is true that Cusk’s titular M does bear a striking resemblance to the Academy Award winner, with both the character and the real-life counterpart having risen to fame as child stars before earning praise in films about a tormented ballet dancer (“Black Swan”) and a school shooting survivor-cum-pop star (“Vox Lux”). Like M, Portman is an ambassador for luxury brands, her face emblazoned across billboards and magazines. The writer and actress are also acquaintances: Portman hosted an interview with Cusk as part of her book club in 2024 and has regularly cited Cusk as one of her favourite authors.
Moreover, “Life of M” wouldn’t be the first time that Cusk, who was born in Saskatoon in 1967, filched from reality. Her early outings in memoir — writing about the trials of motherhood in “A Life’s Work” and her bitter divorce in “Aftermath” — earned criticism for their harsh portrayals of real people, and she was sued for libel after 2009’s “The Last Supper,” resulting in an early run being pulped in the U.K. She has since found success as a progenitor of contemporary “autofiction,” a genre of first-person novels that are in many ways verifiably true but also couch their autobiography in fictive license (her “Outline” trilogy is considered a staple of the genre).
But to suggest that Cusk’s autofiction is simply a marriage of fiction and autobiography isn’t quite right either — instead, what readers and critics enjoy about her novels is how they deliberately dissolve a distinction between the two. This has never been more apparent than in “Life of M,” which, despite what the gossip sites say, is not really an account of Portman or any other star’s life. Instead, the novel explores how we all “act” every day, how the boundaries of reality and creativity are ultimately false, and how, particularly in the age of parasociality, we can even claim to know who another person is at all.
Early in the novel, Cusk explains that for M, early childhood fame has removed the possibility of ever leading a normal existence. The actress therefore tries to do what she can to imitate the modest habits or routines of her underlings but finds that living a so-called “real life” is not like shedding a role but playing one.
Turning this over, Cusk’s narrator, herself a writer who is friendly with M and has been engaged by her to write a kind of biography, observes how many social interactions are now taught to us by what we see onscreen. In other words, while pedestrian habits provide a template for M to imitate and idealize in private, her public performances are the standard against which members of the public come to measure their own “normalcy,” or find examples of how to be in the world. No natural source of truth can be identified here — as with much autofiction, we aren’t ever sure what is original and what is contrived, or if there is a difference between the two.
Cusk implies that this is an effect of modern life. Old stars, her narrator notes, didn’t seem interested in imitating realism; we liked them for their glamorous remove and exaggerated comportment. Celebrity involved the cultivation of mystery, a cleavage of the public persona from the private self.
Today, an actress’s desire to be normal, and the public’s desire for her to be “like us” (but also not — she needs to be beautiful, charming, say the right things, and so like M, can’t indulge in eating a slice of pie at her friends’ dinner party), is a regular feature of fan culture that has been accelerated first by tabloid media, and more recently by the internet.
An actor’s social media page is likely to be seen by more people than their films are, as is the case with the increasingly absurd theatrics of a promotional “press tour,” where celebrities must participate in interviews while playing games, eating spicy food and taking lie detector tests. While the star is performing as themselves, the public weighs in on their portrayal of authenticity: do they seem media-trained, withholding and mincing their words? Or are they authentic and spontaneous, someone who could be your “close personal friend,” as the internet likes to say?
This phenomenon has been described as an uptick in parasocial relationships, or one-sided bonds that we form with fictional characters and public personalities. It is a fantasy that shares many features with fiction-writing, especially for “Life of M”’s writer-narrator: after showing a draft of her book to M, she confesses that during a period of personal tragedy, it felt like a relief not just to write about M, but to escape into her life. Imagining M’s days, watching her films and focusing on her hypothetical neuroses afforded the narrator space from her own. When M is repulsed by this admission, the narrator feels “as though the being in which I was attempting to live was refusing to host me anymore.”
Cusk therefore likens the writer to a parasite who feeds on others, whether by representing their private truths or using them as stimuli for imagination — much like detractors have said of her. But the author is also thinking about a very human and vulnerable struggle to know and to love those to whom we are already ostensibly close. One’s impressions of others are always formed from the stories we’ve made up about them, based on the moments we witness and the impressions that are left.
When it comes to these kinds of existential insights, Cusk is terribly clever; she brilliantly turns the mundane stuff of life into pearls of wisdom. “Sometimes we bump into a friend unexpectedly in the street and their face before they look up and notice us is always shocking,” she observes near the book’s middle. “They are a little embarrassed; they know that something of their private existence has been seen. Yet we feel more love for them having seen it.”
And we realize that what we do see of them, on a regular basis, is only a part of their story.
There is no pure biography, then: if Cusk is divulging anything, what she is saying is that it’s all fiction. All we can ever know of others are versions of them, making the pursuit of something “true” a fool’s errand.
