'A literary assassination': How Life of M sparked a Hollywood scandal

Controversy is swirling around Rachel Cusk's new novel and its movie-star protagonist named "M". Why the fuss – and could the character be based on Natalie Portman?

From Truman Capote mining the secrets of his high society friends for his writing to The Devil Wears Prada's Miranda Priestly bearing a striking similarity to Vogue's Anna Wintour, there's always a certain excitement in discovering that a literary character might not be entirely fictional – especially when their rumoured inspiration is a public figure. 

The new novel by Rachel Cusk, Life of M, tells the story of a fictional actor, "M", some of whose biographical details bear an uncanny resemblance to those of real-life film star Natalie Portman. 

Anticipation for the new novel was already high – "a blazing interrogation of fame, power, beauty and truth," said its publisher. Cusk is one of contemporary fiction's most celebrated and boundary pushing writers, and so a new book by her is always an event. But interest soon spilled beyond the literary world when the seeming Portman connection was made.

Cusk is known for taking no prisoners in her prose – she is unsentimental in her work and depicts human frailty with a cold, clinical eye. So the book was never going to be an empathetic look at the life of a film star – and sure enough, reports appeared suggesting the actress was unhappy with Cusk's portrayal. By the time the book came out last week, countless stories had been published speculating on what really went on between the pair, most of them pure speculation and gossip.

Inevitably, that gossip has turned the book into one of this year's most talked about novels. But what's the real story behind it?

In July, several weeks before Cusk's latest novel Life of M was due to be published, culture journalist Valerie Stivers wrote an article for the website Unherd claiming that the book, about a famous actress whose life is depressingly hollow and devoid of emotion, was "a dark portrait of Natalie Portman" and that the actress was less than happy with the result.

Stivers wrote: "No one in her right mind who understood Rachel Cusk's work would allow her to write about her." It immediately sparked chatter about whether Portman – known to be a big fan of Cusk's writing – had at some point agreed for her life to be used by the author. Or had Cusk co-opted Portman's experiences without her permission? And if she had, did that matter?

The plot thickened when further details of the book emerged. We learned Life of M features two main protagonists – a nameless (and genderless) writer and a famous movie actress, M. "A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography," begins the book. "She liked the idea. "Much later in the book, M is unhappy, telling the writer: "I don't like the way you portray me… Actually, it's hurtful." But is this whole set-up pure fiction, or did an exchange like this really take place between Cusk and Portman?

Both women live in Paris and their paths have crossed. Portman has twice selected Cusk's novels for her book club, interviewed the writer and stated she is "forever in awe of Rachel Cusk and the way she disrupts form and the conventions of storytelling". However, a source told Vanity Fair that they've never had "much of a relationship at all."

In an interview with the New York Times, Cusk was coy about her inspiration for M, stating that whether the book is based on a real person "is not really the point."

However, some parallels between M and Portman appear undeniable. Cusk's character found fame as a child actress in a movie with an older male co-star that "immediately brought her childhood to an end," and which sounds a lot like Portman’s breakout film 1994’s Léon: The Professional. M is also the face of a major brand, appearing in ads" wreathed in the pink flowers of spring," – Portman is the face of Miss Dior fragrance. 

Then there are M's film roles, which include a troubled prima ballerina and a school shooting survivor who becomes a pop star – strikingly similar to characters Portman played in Black Swan and Vox Lux.

Portman herself has kept quiet over the drama, but Vanity Fair suggested disquiet in her camp, reporting: "Her friends are pretty enraged as the depiction of M has so little resemblance to Natalie outside of the résumé." 

The Telegraph called the book "a literary assassination" of Portman. It's true that the character of M is not a sympathetic one. Though charming on the surface, she's also condescending, detached and obsessed with appearance. When she encounters a sales assistant who looks a lot like her facially but whose body is larger, M spends the rest of the day thinking about "the full hips and the pair of sturdy legs that would have altered her destiny." 

Mostly, she's unaware that her attempts to stay connected to the real world are totally futile.

Yet, as alluded to right from the start, what we know of M is completely made up by the novel's narrator. By assuming the character is a reflection of Portman we are projecting our own narrative on to the book and the actress herself. We are told M likes to construct her own reality – but is Cusk suggesting that we also do the same?

A new Rachel Cusk book igniting conversation – and controversy – shouldn't be a huge surprise. The British author, who published her first book in 1993 and has gone on to write 15 more, has long been a provocative literary figure. 

Cusk's memoirs have been especially divisive. In 2001's A Life's Work she gave a brutally honest account of the suffocating nature of early motherhood, describing it as a "sort of compound fenced off from the rest of the world" and likening herself to an inmate trapped in a cell. At the time the book caused uproar, but now feels like it paved the way for other women to write more openly about motherhood.

Life of M is also not the first time that Cusk has caused a stir for how she depicts supposedly real-life characters. Her publisher was forced to pulp the initial print run of her 2009 memoir The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy after a man she'd met on holiday recognised himself in the book – and sued over the unflattering portrait. 

After more backlash to her 2012 divorce memoir Aftermath (a review in The Sunday Times called Cusk "a peerless narcissist"), Cusk told the Guardian she'd had a "creative death". She was no longer interested in writing traditional memoir ("I could not do it without being misunderstood and making people angry") but she also found fiction "fake and embarrassing." 

Instead she embraced autofiction, a genre that blurs the boundaries between the two. In doing so, she produced her most acclaimed work to date, The Outline Trilogy. The books – Outline, Transit and Kudos – feature a writer called Faye who closely resembles Cusk, and who engages in long conversations with people she encounters.

And yet, even then, Cusk still ruffled some feathers. The Scottish author Damian Barr, who met Cusk at a literary festival and later recognised a version of the encounter in Transit, described her fictional veil as "thinner than a thin thing."

If you pick up Life of M expecting a juicy Hollywood tell-all packaged up as a literary novel then expect to be disappointed. Despite all the headlines, the Portman parallels may actually be something of a distraction. Life of M is less about a celebrity, than the whole concept of celebrity, with M a mere avatar for this.

Cusk's works are increasingly concerned with the nature of identity, and a character who spends her life playing roles gives her the ideal vehicle to explore ideas about authenticity. She's sharp on how we perform for each other, even our closest friends, writing: "We wish that we could see them as a hidden camera would see them, alone at home, when they thought themselves unobserved."

Life of M is a slim novel – just 183 pages – with Cusk's spare prose making it feel even more slight. Cusk likes to play with form, and the book shifts between three perspectives. Besides the "I" of the narrator, there are a series of third-person observations about M (presumably scenes from the narrator's own book). More mysteriously, some interludes are narrated by an unidentified "we" – Cusk's attempt to express through fiction her belief that character no longer exists and individuality has been replaced by a collective, homogenised human experience.

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Cusk's experimentation can be exhilarating, but comes at the cost of coherence, and her emotional detachment sometimes makes the novel feel as cold and empty as the curated spaces M occupies. Reviews have been tepid. The New York Times described the novel as "chilly and abstract", while The New Yorker said it was her "weakest novel yet". The Guardian, a little more generously, called it "a book to admire enormously, but not one to love."

The novel's ending, which throws everything before it into question, is particularly polarising. Cusk has already come out on the defensive, saying: "To me, the book, it's a daring book, it's a strange book, and it isn't a scandal or a subject for gossip."

She's right on the first point – Life of M is a deliberately defiant, weird and uncompromising novel that will, once again, inspire furious debate. The many column inches it has already racked up suggests it's too late to stop the excited chatter over its inspiration.

Life of M is published by Faber in the UK and Macmillan in the US.

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