Is Natalie Portman the target of her friend’s spiky new novel?

Leaf ArbuthnotMon, July 27, 2026 at 3:36 PM UTC

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Life of M, a new novel by Rachel Cusk, paints an unflattering image of a fictional actress whose career resembles that of Natalie Portman

The writer Rachel Cusk has long mined her own life, and the lives of those closest to her, for material for her critically acclaimed novels. Now, if gossip in publishing circles – and an explosive article by the critic Valerie Stivers – are to be believed, Cusk has trained her novelist’s eye on the actress Natalie Portman, whom she seems to portray in her book Life of M, out next month.

Both Portman and Cusk live in Paris (Portman in a stunning 5,900-sq-ft flat near the Eiffel Tower, Cusk in an apartment in the fashionable Marais district). The pair have known each other for years: Portman has interviewed Cusk for her Instagram account Natalie’s Book Club and twice chosen to promote Cusk’s novels on the platform. Cusk and Portman swim in the same anglophone literary circle; they regularly interview authors at institutions like Shakespeare and Company, and do events that blend literature with high fashion.

Portman is not named in the book: The character who seems to be her, or at least be inspired by her, goes by the letter “M”. But the parallels between M and Portman are so glaring they become hard to ignore.

To pick a few: Portman famously came to prominence with her first role as an uncomfortably sexualised 12-year-old in the 1994 film Léon: The Professional. Cusk’s character M was also a child actor, and tells the narrator “that starring in a film had immediately brought her childhood to an end” (an echo of pronouncements Portman has made herself about her early start in the film industry). Another echo: At the time Léon was made, Portman’s mother stepped in to ensure that sex scenes involving Portman and her much older co-star were removed from the final film. This rather specific experience, we discover, also happened to M.

Both Portman and the Life of M character starred in a film about ballet - Niko Tavernise/AP

The similarities go on. Portman has long been the face of Miss Dior; for years, city billboards all over the world have borne pictures of the actress wreathed in pretty pink flowers. M, we learn in Cusk’s novel, also smiles out of ubiquitous adverts, “wreathed in the pink flowers of spring”. And: Portman is perhaps best known for her portrayal of a ballet dancer in Black Swan, a role for which she trained for a year with New York City Ballet. M, too, starred in a film about ballet – for which she trained with “starved and chain-smoking ballerinas”.

It is notable that Cusk’s publisher and literary agency have not made any effort to stamp out the Portman rumours. Indeed, a source close to Portman tells The Telegraph that Cusk’s team “are certainly leaning in” to the rumours. Life of M is not likely to suffer from speculation that it offers an insider’s view on Portman, one of the world’s most recognisable stars – far from it. It might lead to boosted sales, a publishing industry insider told The Telegraph. “There are so many books out there, it’s really hard to cut through.”

In fact, the question exercising many within the publishing industry now is not whether M really is Portman, but whether Portman collaborated with Cusk’s project, and whether she now regrets it. At the start of the novel – about an unnamed narrator’s encounters with an internationally known film star – the narrator tells M that she is thinking of writing her “autobiography”, and M says she likes the idea (“She’s a good sport,” the narrator comments).

By the end of the book, however, M’s perky enthusiasm for the project has chilled to something like horror. “I don’t like the way you portray me,” M tells the narrator. “You’ve made it seem like I lack humanity. You’ve made it seem like I’m unable to love.”

The Portman rumour has raised the profile of Life of M

While the novel makes it sound as if M (or Portman) has come to rue allowing Cusk to write about her, a source close to Portman says the pair are acquaintances at best, and do not know each other well enough for Cusk to be able to faithfully portray Portman in fiction. The pair appeared to get on well when Portman interviewed Cusk for her online book club in 2022. “I’m so,sograteful to be speaking to Rachel Cusk today, one of my favourite writers,” Portman told her reverently.

Two years later, Portman described herself as “forever in awe” of Cusk.The source, who has read the book, told The Telegraph that while Portman still admires Cusk’s writing and respects her freedom to write about whatever she wants, “M’s personality is not Portman at all”. If anything, the source added, M is a stand-in for Cusk. Portman herself is “more concerned with the state of the world” than with the rumours that she is M, the source says.

As literary assassinations go, Cusk’s of M is sly and subtle, but it is lethal nonetheless. The impression is of an author pulling the limbs off a person one by one, as a child might do to an insect, with no regard whatsoever for the creature’s suffering or sense of self.

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But as is typical of Cusk, Life of M isn’t a straightforward hit job: M’s prettiness and charm are often stressed. She is shown being gracious to those who pester her for selfies in restaurants, or who try to take pictures of her while ostentatiously pretending to be photographing their dessert. M is humble, we hear repeatedly; she is nice to staff and takes her children to school herself, when her schedule allows it.

Rachel Cusk (pictured in 2016) lives in Paris – as does Portman - Rii Schroer

Even so, the unsettling argument throughout the book is that M is engaged in a constant effort to seem like a believable person. For example, M meets up with friends and walks her dogs not because she wants to do so for ordinary reasons like care for her friends and duty towards her dogs, but because she sees these activities as normal, and therefore is driven to do them. When one of M’s friends opens up to M about her depression, the actress “cannot really understand” what the friend is trying to convey. “She has acted the parts of depressed people but she has no evidence that depression is real”. She feels pity for the friend – but only the pity you would feel “for an animal in pain”.

What is cruel about Cusk’s portrait is the impregnable fort of isolation she decides the actress lives within. M, we learn, is always playing a part and thus has “no home”. We do not see her being delighted by her children. Her marriage is implied to be falling apart (Portman herself divorced in 2024). “Even love,” Cusk writes of the actress, “has failed to grip her entirely, or perhaps especially love, because it is there that she has felt most distinctly the impossibility of total sincerity.”

This portrayal is wide of the mark, the source close to Portman argues. “Natalie is anything but lonely. She has the closest group of friends, she is surrounded by love and community, she is incredibly warm and loving. She’s not detached in the way she is portrayed in the book.” The book is, the source stresses, “a work of fiction”. Representatives for Cusk did not reply to The Telegraph’s request for comment on any of these allegations.

Portman has twice promoted Cusk’s novels in her book club

Of course, writers cannibalising the lives of those they know – or barely know – is far from a new phenomenon. The US-based book publicist and writer Alexis Nowicki experienced the strangeness of becoming the subject of literary fiction when the writer Kristen Roupenian published the short story Cat Person in The New Yorker in 2017.

The story went viral – reshared and commented upon millions of times – and when Nowicki read it, she felt a shock of recognition. The events in the story had happened, more or less, to her. “I don’t think there should be any rules about when it’s OK to turn real life into literature,” Nowicki says. “But where it gets murky is when you use details about someone that are so obviously them that other people recognise it.”

Nowicki found the experience of being fashioned into fiction “disorientating, alienating and uncanny – uncanny especially”. She had to fight hard, she says, to continue to believe in her own memory of the relationship that was portrayed in Roupenian’s story. It was tempting to allow the fictional version to trump what she remembers having happened.

Cusk has form for this kind of thing, having long written in tantalisingly veiled ways about those occupying the most intimate roles in her life. In 2001, she almost single-handedly launched the now thriving genre of the gruelling motherhood memoir with her book A Life’s Work, in which she shattered some of the mistier dreams of what mothering can entail.

’Natalie is anything but lonely,’ says a source close to Portman (pictured walking her dog, Whiz, with her mother in 2011) - Bauer-Griffin

One critic complained that if everyone were to read A Life’s Work, “the propagation of the human race would virtually cease”. Other readers condemned her for having written so intimately about her children without their consent. After the book’s publication, Cusk later wrote, she felt she had been “abusive and negligent” in allowing her relationship with her children to be dragged into the public eye.

But the shame quickly ceded to pride; and other books in which she mined others for material soon followed. In 2009, she published The Last Supper, about a family trip to Italy, but the publisher was forced to withdraw the book after someone saw themselves in one of the book’s characters and threatened a libel and breach-of-privacy lawsuit. In Aftermath (2012), she exposed – in a prose that was characteristically cold to the touch – the breakdown of her marriage to the photographer Adrian Clarke.

It is possible, Nowicki says, that the rumour that Life of M is about Portman will lead to increased sales. But ultimately, Nowicki says, “if anyone reads it to find juicy details about Natalie Portman, they’ll be disappointed – it’s more literary than people who read celebrity gossip tend to care for”.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”