Some good old-fashioned literary drama is just the thing for late summer. Pairs well with mint juleps and malaise, I think. This week, those of this opinion were darkly pleased to learn that Rachel Cusk’s new novel (Life of M) is apparently based on the life of real human actress Natalie Portman. And if our deep reads are correct, the Black Swan doesn’t love this.
To start from the top, with the tea. Cusk and Portman have been friendly for several years, and are apparently mutual fans. Portman selected Cusk’s novel Parade for her book club back in 2024, and there has been at least one warm public discussion between the actor and the novelist.
Life of M picks up on recent Cusk preoccupations, such as the instability of the self. But the new novel leans on some highly specific receipts.
As Valerie Strivers observed in a spelunk for UnHerd, the book is about a “famous actress, M, and a nameless writer-friend’s project to chronicle her.” And M and Portman share enough similarities to raise eyebrows.
How did sleuths connect the dots? Cusk’s fictional heroine is, “in addition to being a film star, the model for a major brand.” She lives in an unnamed European city. And she got her start as a child—specifically in a Lolita-like role in a European film that “immediately brought her childhood to an end,” in the narrator’s opinion.
Portman is a famous actress and Dior model living in Paris. Her first project was this.
There are other, less savory breadcrumbs. M—who also played a ballerina in one of her better-known film roles—apparently struggles to connect with the common folk outside the realm of fame. She comes across in the novel as tense, myopic, alienated. Not so great in a crisis.
Which could explain how, per Strivers, “the actress’s dissatisfaction and betrayal at the finished product, as recorded in the final pages of [Life of M], is also said to be true to life.”
Portman’s people have so far elided direct comment on the rumors. Though Strivers reports that background sources have sought to downgrade any presumed connection between Cusk and Portman, from friends to business acquaintances.
We may note that this isn’t the first time poor Natalie’s been on the bummer end of a para-social relationship with a novelist. What’s that about?
As Hunter Harris put it in a recent episode of Hung Up: does Natalie Portman have a Bad Art Friend? (Or two?)
As for Cusk? The novelist has made no direct comment either. But we may also look to history for clues.
Cusk’s later writing is famously cool and clinical about human frailty. And in recent years, her unsparing eye has grown less and less interested in certain kinds of invention. As she told The New Yorker in 2018, “I don’t think character exists anymore.” Yet those are people, in her pages.
We may also note this isn’t the first time Cusk has been accused of insufficient fictionalization, perhaps in the name of that truthier style.
As The Times reported, the first run of her 2009 novel The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy was “pulped” because “Cusk did not sufficiently disguise the people she wrote about and was threatened with a lawsuit for breach of privacy.”
And in 2017, the memoirist Damian Barr groused that he was the unhappy inspiration for a character in Transit.
Hey, we all make mistakes. I am personally grateful for the artists who brought us this and this, and keen to read between the fine lines of Life of M. But for any subjects on the fence: maybe don’t put your life in the hands of a novelist.
Who knows which self they’ll see?
