Rachel Cusk's 'Life of M': A Film-Star Novel That Looks a Lot Like Natalie Portman
Rachel Cusk's new novel Life of M arrives on shelves on 25 August 2026, and its protagonist — a film star called M — bears more than a passing resemblance to Natalie Portman. A review published in The Guardian on 21 August lays out the parallels in plain detail.
M's first film has its sex scenes cut at her mother's insistence, a detail the Guardian review likens to Portman's 1994 film début in Léon, which she made at the age of thirteen. M later stars in a ballerina movie recognisably modelled on Black Swan, the 2010 psychological thriller for which Portman won the Academy Award for Best Actress. The parallels are specific enough that a New York Times interview with Cusk, published on 20 August, put the resemblance to Portman directly to the author for discussion.
The novel itself is an unusual object. It is narrated by a figure who is both nameless and genderless, observing M's life of fame, power and beauty. Cusk, whose previous novel was Parade (2024), has long been sceptical of conventional characterisation; in a 2018 New Yorker interview she declared that 'I don't think character exists anymore.' Life of M grew out of a short story titled 'Project', published in the New Yorker's 1 September 2025 issue.
For readers, the Portman echoes are the hook, but the book's structure is the more striking feature — a protagonist defined by a single initial, refracted through a narrator with no fixed identity.
The novel comes into the world through two major publishers. In the United States, Farrar, Straus and Giroux — an imprint of Macmillan — is issuing the 192-page hardcover at US$27 (Publishers Weekly). In the United Kingdom, Faber & Faber is publishing the hardback at £18.99, with a signed independent-bookshop and website-exclusive edition also available (Faber & Faber). The Guardian Bookshop has listed the standard hardback at a discounted £16.14.
Faber has described the novel as 'an irresistible novel of fame, power, beauty and truth' and a 'blazing renovation of the form' — publisher's language that signals ambition, though whether the book delivers on it is for reviewers to say, not the imprint.
What gives the Portman resemblance its charge is the way Cusk layers it: not as biography, but as a set of cinematic waypoints — a début shaped by a mother's intervention, a ballerina's descent — that anyone who has followed Portman's career will recognise on contact. Cusk does not name her protagonist's real-world counterpart. She does not need to. The detail does the work.
The timing is tight. With publication four days away, the Guardian review and the New York Times interview have landed in the same week, each amplifying the same question: is M Natalie Portman? Cusk's answer, in the Times conversation, is part of the story the book is selling — a novel about how fame, beauty and power blur the line between a person and the roles she plays.
Life of M is Cusk's first novel since Parade, and it arrives with the kind of pre-publication attention — two major outlets, a famous real-world echo and a publisher pushing hard — that most fiction never receives. Whether that attention converts to readers is a question for the cash register. The book itself is about to find out.
