Rachel Cusk's Life of M turns the celebrity memoir inside out

Rachel Cusk’s new novel arrives trailing the question every publicist dreams of and every serious writer claims to dread: who is it really about? Life of M, reviewed this week by The Guardian, concerns a child-star-turned-fashion-face named M, whose biography maps closely enough on to Natalie Portman’s that the press, per the review, has “gleefully seized upon” the resemblance. A debut film with its sex scenes cut at a mother’s insistence; a ballerina picture that is “recognisably” a Black Swan analogue. Cusk, the review notes, must have known exactly what she was doing.

A novel about the impossibility of the ghostwritten life

The plot, such as it is, turns on a proposal: the book’s narrator - unnamed, ungendered - suggests writing M’s autobiography. M’s reply, “Would you just make it up?”, is the hinge the whole enterprise swings on. What follows is less a portrait of celebrity than an dissection of the transaction underneath it: the coffee in a luxury hotel, the disastrous lunch, the narrator’s own crisis (a partner’s sudden illness) intruding on the performance of friendship. The reviewer is clear that any expectation of ghostwriting, or even of straightforward roman à clef, dissolves quickly. What’s left is Cusk’s familiar terrain - the gap between the story a public life is made to tell and the person living inside it - reworked through the specific, modern indignity of fame as an industry.

The real story is the transaction, not the identity

This is where the “is it Portman?” framing does the book a disservice, and also where it’s most useful as a story about publishing. A celebrity autobiography, ghostwritten or otherwise, is a commercial product with a well-understood supply chain: agent, publisher advance, co-writer fee, and a star whose name alone justifies the outlay. Cusk’s novel dramatises the moment that machinery breaks down - when the subject can’t, or won’t, hand over a usable version of herself, and the writer can’t, or won’t, supply one either. The line the review quotes - the narrator feeling like the actor, with M “the only one good enough at acting to attain reality” - is a neat inversion of the ghostwriter’s usual bargain, in which the professional writer manufactures authenticity for a fee and everyone agrees not to mention it.

What’s actually checkable here

None of this requires Portman’s cooperation, comment or even awareness, and there is no suggestion in the source material that she has responded to the parallels; readers should treat the “based on” framing as a critic’s observation about textual detail (Leon, Black Swan) rather than a confirmed biographical key. What is solid: a new Cusk novel exists, has been reviewed, and explicitly plays with recognisable elements of a specific, famous career without naming names. That’s a familiar and legally cautious move in literary fiction about real fame - close enough to generate coverage, distant enough to avoid a lawyers’ letter.

The takeaway

Cusk has form for turning her own life and others’ into unstable material, and Life of M reads, on this evidence, as a continuation of that project rather than a straightforward exposé or authorised portrait. The “who is M really” chatter is good for sales and headlines, but the more durable subject here is the one publishing rarely likes to examine too closely: what happens when the person who owns a story and the person paid to tell it can’t agree on what’s true. That’s worth more attention than the guessing game.