Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | August 28, 2026
Being famous is weird. You give up all ideas of privacy to become a public vessel for millions of contradicting and aggravating ideas. Strangers knock on your door as if they're your friend and expect you to be grateful for it. anonymous weirdos rate your feet. And sometimes, your favourite author writes a thinly-veiled book about you wherein you're made to look like a neurotic oddball who can't handle the real world. So, spare a thought for Natalie Portman, who just wanted to hang out with a writer she admired and ended up at the centre of the biggest highbrow literary gossip story of 2026.
A couple of months ago, a journalist claimed that Life of M, the next novel from Rachel Cusk, was a autofiction biography of Portman, inspired by time that the acclaimed author spent with her in Paris. It seemed like an intriguing change of pace for Cusk, who is largely known for plundering her own life and experiences for inspiration, albeit through a more experimental non-narrative lens. She eschews plot and character for a kind of ideas-focused work that seeks to explore the heart of human nature. Characters are nameless or known by initials or occupations. Internal monologues are rejected. The idea, Cusk fans argue, is that by eschewing the expected conventions of the novel, ones typically deemed male-coded, a rarified kind of truth can be excavated. Surely Cusk, with this approach, could find something unique to say about the oddities of a life lived in the spotlight? No. Not even close.
Life of M is clearly about Natalie Portman in the details, but everything else about it is almost insultingly simple. Reading it, I couldn't help but imagine Cusk, like that annoying child on the playground, right up in Portman's personal space while smugly proclaiming, "ooh, but I'm not touching you!" For an author who typically rejects precision in her autobiographical details, she sure is eager to let the reader know that M is 100% Portman. She discusses specific films, like Leon and Black Swan, and related tidbits about their production and Portman's acting process. There are references to a contentious divorce, life in Paris, and having been famous since childhood. And all of this, through Cusk's eyes, has made Portman/M a woman with no internal life.
M lives a frictionless life, one made easy by money and celebrity but also hindered by it. She didn't have a normal childhood, which she regrets. She often doesn't have the control over her career that she craves. Humans struggling with their feelings [...] forms a large part of her acting repertoire," the narrator tells us. But off-screen, she is likeable and appealing, although that is also clearly artificial in some way. It's just another role she plays, and M can never stop playing roles.
This is the grand conclusion that Cusk comes to regarding the life of M, and it is, frankly, weaker than a sleepy toddler. This is her grand revelation? It's one she comes to quickly and has little to add to over the course of this brief novel. And since she has decided it so thoroughly, and has no desire to explore it in a conventional manner, she resorts to a ton of padding. We get a lot of basic descriptions of hotel rooms, holiday villas, and trailers. The goal is seemingly to show them as a symbol of M's vapid life, but given that they're often the only thing that Cusk spends any time describing, it reads like celebration. Indeed, she has greater interest in desks than M.
In the final chapter, M tells the writer that she does not like how she has been depicted. She finds the writer's perspective to be needlessly cruel, one that portrays her "like I lack humanity." But "it isn't you," the writer insists. "It isn't anyone." A galling claim to make given that Cusk is deliberate in allowing the reader to know that Portman was her subject. But she is right to a degree. M isn't anyone because Cusk has zero interest in making her anything beyond a collection of vagaries. It could be any random celebrity, but it also couldn't because how many actresses do you know who made Black Swan?
The vague sheen of fiction seems to have given Cusk permission to treat Portman as a cross between a medical school cadaver and a face on a poster advertising perfume. Cusk has said that she felt entitled to a story like Portman's because when "famous people enter the public imagination," they become a kind of public property. She's rich and famous so she can do with her as she pleases, right? It's a claim that we hear all the time, from the paparazzi to social media trolls. It's also one that, as Parul Sehgal of The New York Times noted, Cusk is terrified of having put upon her own work or life. In Life of M, the writer character laments feeling small and insecure next to M, but is also quick to judge her new acquaintance as a faux-intellectual whose talents are used to obscure a deceitful mind. And it all serves to make the writer the good one of the pair. To quote Seghal, "Persecution becomes proof of integrity."
I'm not here to make a hard call on whether or not real people's lives and emotions can be used for creative inspiration. If we take that away, we erase millennia of art, but if we act with impunity in every case, we cannot be surprised when feelings are hurt and others react with ire. Cusk is right in that people project all manner of jackassery onto women like Portman. Just ask Moby. But the portrait she offers of M is limiting, scolding, and incurious. Rejecting character has not given her greater insight into celebrity or art (the creative process is barely present in this book, which feels insulting for author and subject alike.)
All of this gossip only benefits Cusk, of course. This is one of her weakest books but it's accrued far more publicity than any of her previous works. She pokes the bear and then claims it's her duty to do so. Portman, understandably, has avoided discussing Life of M. She's currently pregnant with her third child and awaiting the release of her next film. There's no benefit to her saying anything about the book. Hopefully she can take comfort in knowing that her internal life was probably too interesting for Cusk to distil into a bag of tricks for her own self-aggrandizing.
