Literary fiction is built with scraps of reality. The psychological construction of characters always borrows something or a lot from real people. The scandal arises when the copy is obvious. Evelyn Waugh imagined the social climber Rex Mottram, husband of Lady Julia Flyte, in Brideshead Revisited based on Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s minister whose pomposity and vanity the writer detested. Truman Capote was condemned to social ostracism and depression when he revealed the secrets of “the swans,” the New York socialites whose friendship he cultivated, in Answered Prayers.
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The writer Rachel Cusk has starred in the “literary betrayal” of the summer with her novel Life of M, published this Tuesday in English, the thinly veiled story of an actress whom critics immediately identified as Natalie Portman. M, according to the book, began her film career with a very “Lolita” role from which her mother demanded the sexual scenes be removed. Portman was never comfortable with her portrayal of Mathilda and her sexualized relationship with a killer in the film Léon: The Professional by Luc Besson, when she was only 11 years old.
M played a dancer in one of her most significant and successful roles. Like Portman, who with Black Swan received a flood of awards and recognitions, including an Oscar. M works for a well-known cosmetics company; Portman is an ambassador for Dior. M lives in a European capital. Portman, in Paris.
The actress, of Israeli and American nationality (Jerusalem, 45 years old), who is also a director, producer, psychologist, and voracious reader, maintained a public relationship with Cusk, whose work she declared herself an admirer of. She incorporated some of her novels into the book club she runs and held at least one public debate about her Parade, one of her works, in 2024.
Portman’s circle has expressed irritation and discomfort over the book’s release, which reached UK bookstores on August 25, but there has been no official or explicit reaction from the actress, who is trying to move on from this episode as quickly as possible and not give it more publicity than necessary.
M appears in the book as a character incapable of building a human emotion, convinced that “you can engineer reality,” tense, short-sighted, alienated. The paradox, critics have pointed out, is that Cusk has once again cruelly exploited a real person with the sole purpose she has always pursued: to write about herself.
The “end” of the character
Rachel Cusk (Saskatoon, Canada, 59 years old) moved to the UK at eight years old and lived there until she settled in Paris in 2021. She has a legion of followers and a large accumulation of awards for a work increasingly taken to the extreme, a deconstruction of literature in which classic elements of realistic fiction such as plot or characters have disappeared, focusing on pure human experience through various conversations of an anonymous narrator with the characters who come across their path. “I don’t think the character exists anymore [in literature],” she said in 2018 to The New Yorker in an interview.
With A Life’s Work, her brutal and dismissive description of motherhood, she caused a stir in literary and non-literary circles and was almost accused of infanticide. She soon went further. With Aftermath and Remains, Cusk presents a moral and personal shipwreck by describing her divorce from photographer Adrian Clarke, which some critics called a “masterpiece of moral dissection,” like Julie Burchill in The Guardian, and others an indescribable exercise in narcissism by the author.
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Cusk has also declined to comment on her clash with Portman, or even on the possibility that the actress is really the inspiration for M, although there is no doubt about it in all the journalistic pieces written about the torrid matter in British and American media.
At the beginning of the novel, the anonymous narrator announces to M his intention to write her biography. “And what will you do? Invent it?” replies the questioned. At the end of the book, M complains to the author that he has made a “painful” portrait of her, showing her as someone “incapable of love.” It is impossible to know if the approach and the ending correspond to a real exchange between Portman and Cusk.
Broken friendship
The media present the book as the trigger for the breakup of a friendship, but the actress’s circle has insisted anonymously that the relationship between the two was limited and never went beyond the professional realm.
Si non è vero, in any case, è ben trovato. If it is not true, it should be. Because the episode fits perfectly with the characters who starred in it. Cusk has never hesitated to exploit everyone around her who has been a source of literary material. The publisher had to withdraw and destroy the first edition of The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (never published in Spanish), because the descriptions of the book’s characters were so dangerously close to the people with whom the writer traveled to Italy that there was a threat of a defamation lawsuit in court.
And Portman had already had a previous turbulent episode with another writer. Her email exchange with American Jonathan Safran Foer, published in 2016 by The New York Times Style Magazine, ended up being mocked on social media and turned into memes, due to the apparent pretentiousness and self-satisfaction of both, discussing topics such as veganism, literature, or Judaism.
That episode, which could have been a great publicity boost for Safran Foer’s next novel, Here I Am, ended up buried under romantic gossip rather than the writer’s literary work. In Cusk’s case, her self-control, and that of who is supposed to be the raw material of her latest work, Portman, may lead to greater interest in the book itself when the soap opera loses momentum.
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