The Art of Becoming Real: Rachel Cusk’s Life of M and the Paradox of Celebrity

There is a moment in Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Life of M, when the narrator—a writer with no name, no gender, and no fixed address—sits across a coffee table from M, a film star so famous she has been public property since childhood. M is, by all accounts, a good sport. She has agreed to the idea of an autobiography, and when the narrator suggests writing it, M’s response is disarmingly simple: “Would you just make it up?” That question, at once playful and profound, is the engine of this exquisite, unsettling book. Cusk has always been a writer of brilliant surfaces and deeper currents, and here she turns her gaze to the most curated life of all: that of the celebrity.

M is not Natalie Portman, of course. But the parallels are so deliberate, so winking, that the press has already had a field day. M’s first film, like Portman’s 1994 debut Léon, had its sex scenes cut at her mother’s insistence. Her ballerina movie is unmistakably Black Swan. And yet, as the narrator notes, M is determined to live as normal a life as possible. Her personal task, we are told, is to become real—or rather, to acquire some reality. It is a task that feels almost heroic, and almost absurd, in an industry built on artifice. The narrator, for all their supposed authenticity, finds themselves acting around M, performing a version of themselves that feels false. “It was as if I was acting, while M came across as authentic and real,” they confess. “It was as if she was the only one good enough at acting to attain reality.”

Cusk has never been interested in easy answers, and Life of M is no exception. The novel is structured as a series of intercut episodes—glimpses of M’s life, from an acting class led by a renowned theatre director to a difficult encounter with a former lover, interwoven with the narrator’s own observations on art, love, and the slippery business of being human. There is no plot in the conventional sense, no tidy arc. Instead, Cusk builds a mosaic of moments, each one a shard of glass reflecting a different angle of the same question: what does it mean to perform one’s own life? The M sections are precise, almost clinical in their specificity, while the narrator’s own experiences blur into a kind of generalized ache. It is a technique that could feel cold, but Cusk’s prose is so alive, so alert to the textures of feeling, that the book hums with warmth and unease.

For the collector of literary rare books, Life of M is already a talking point. Cusk’s previous novels—the Outline trilogy, Second Place—have become cult objects, their first editions commanding prices that would make a dealer blush. This new work, published by Faber in the UK and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US, is likely to follow suit. Early copies with signed pages are already appearing on the secondary market, and collectors are circling. But the book’s true value lies not in its physical scarcity but in its intellectual provocation. It is a novel about the price of visibility, the cost of being seen, and the strange comfort of being unknown. In a world where everyone is curating a life, where every dinner is a potential Instagram post and every vacation a potential brand partnership, Life of M feels less like fiction and more like a mirror.

What makes Life of M so timely is its refusal to moralize. Cusk does not condemn M’s fame, nor does she romanticize it. She simply observes, with the precision of a jeweler examining a flawed stone, the way celebrity warps the space around it. The narrator’s partner falls ill, and the narrator retreats from M, acknowledging that their lunch together was a mistake—an attempt at intimacy that could only fail. And yet a book about M materializes anyway. It is a book about what we choose to show and what we choose to hide, about the gap between the self we present and the self we suspect we are. For the ultra-wealthy, who know something about living behind glass, this is familiar territory. The curated life is a performance, and Cusk has written its most elegant critique.

Looking forward, Life of M will likely be read as a turning point in Cusk’s career, a consolidation of her themes and a deepening of her method. It is a book that rewards rereading, that reveals new facets with each pass. And for those who have ever wondered what it might be like to sit across from a star and ask them to be real, it offers a haunting answer: the star is often the only one who can. The rest of us are just acting.