Throughout the twentieth century and for most of the twenty-first thus far, the quest to become famous has remained a common goal among the starry-eyed and attractive (even if only “by small-town standards”). In fact, one could argue it has for so long been presented as the foremost goal not just because of fame’s erstwhile association with wealth, but because “who wouldn’t want their name ‘up in the lights,’ eh?” The answer to that being, increasingly: a lot of people. At least if one is to go by a recent poll that found seventy-nine percent of Gen Z said they would prefer to live a private life over a public one. Which means that, for all intents and purposes, fame—a.k.a. pervasive visibility—as it exists in the current era has become so unpleasant, grotesque and untenable that most would have to be fools at this point to “strive” for it. Either that, or bona fide artists (usually actors or musicians) whose medium of choice managed to break through and achieve the impossible—“monetization”—so they decide to just “roll with it” and double down on that annoying adage, “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.”

At first glance, of course, Rachel Cusk’s latest “slim tome,” Life of M, will not be viewed as a skewering of fame and the longtime collective obsession with it. Instead, it will likelier be viewed as a somewhat random takedown of Natalie Portman (indeed, it might as well be called Life of N). Random in the sense that, of all the condemnable celebrities out there, why her? (Well, apart from the complications of her “Liberal Zionism” when it comes to Israel.) Journeying further into the text, however, reveals that there’s a kind of method to Cusk’s decision to write a faux autobiography about the actress, who, in the end, is never even named. Only (very heavily) hinted at. And the hints come barreling toward the reader from the very first page thanks to Cusk’s allusion to Portman’s enduring status as “the face of” Miss Dior, writing, “In addition to being a film star she was the model for a major brand, and her image looked out everywhere, from shop windows and hoardings and the rain-streaked perspex of bus shelters.”

To ensure that the reader really understands that it’s Portman, Cusk continues, “In the photograph she appeared very young and happy. Her smile had a sweetness that almost seemed to reproach those who looked at it for their dim and suspicious view of life.” So it is that Cusk immediately establishes a core theme of Life of M—the notion that the constant barrage of images, often advertisements, of or centered on “celebrity” infects the brain in insidious ways. Not least of which is the habit of comparison. Something Cusk’s genderless (this keyword will be paramount to the book’s final line) narrator can’t help but do when she finds herself near or next to “M,” noting, “It was hard not to feel ugly next to M. Part of it was the ugliness of experience. I had never learned how to make experience easier for myself. For M it was the reverse. Her difficulty lay in her distance from the random violence of insignificance. Personally I felt saturated with that violence. All my life it had been made clear to me how unimportant I was.”

To a certain extent, Cusk’s narrator is framing that “unimportance” within the context of being near a celebrity because, time and time again, the proverbial “commoner” is hammered with the idea—whether directly or indirectly—that celebrities are “of a higher stature.” In short, the modern-day equivalent of the gods that hover above the rest of us. And always reminding the hoi polloi of their elevated position through various aggressions, whether passive, “micro” or otherwise. One such aggression that comes to mind being their penchant for chartering private planes, an act among the rich that accounts for approximately “1.8% of the carbon pollution from aviation.” Or, to put it in more visual terms, “A typical private jet emits as many greenhouse gases each year as one hundred seventy-seven passenger cars or nine heavy-duty highway trucks.” But even the private jet aspect of celebrity is something Cusk’s narrator attempts to “humanize,” to make the reader more empathetic, at times, toward M and her celebrity brethren. This by likening it to the desperate search for some kind of privacy (de facto, obscurity), remarking on how celebrities’ “search for anonymity bespeaks something darker and more depressive, a hatred of the separation [from the common people] itself, an impossible desire to return to the innocence of communality. The king-like silliness of the people with private jets is easy to mock. The yearning for anonymity is more complex.”

But back to Cusk ensuring the reader knows from the outset that it’s Portman she has in mind. For, as if her initial re-creations of the perfume ad campaign weren’t enough, Cusk drills in the Miss Dior image with the description, “It was autumn and the city became inexorably colder and wetter and more gray. In the brand advertisements, M remained wreathed in the pink flowers of spring.” This visual being another form in which Cusk can identify the many ways that M does not live like most of the rest of the world is forced to. An example of this offered early in the novel when the narrator, meeting with M for the first time (and expressly stating that she had no idea who M was before this moment), goes into an opulent hotel and asks if they can be seated in the garden. In response, “the man at the desk told me that the garden was closed for winter.” But when M flounces in, slightly late, and asks for the same thing, “he was instantly obliging.” The narrator then realizes, “This was how people and things behaved around her. Reality became malleable, was always giving way and changing rules. In a sense it was the same lawlessness as that of films, as though M were always in a film, even when she wasn’t. It seemed like the greatest good fortune to have been removed from reality and its rules in this way.”

But if one pulls back the curtain just far enough, The Wizard of Oz-style, Cusk seems just as keen to make the point that being famous—immune to “reality,” as it were—is a prison devoid of any meaning or purpose that one shouldn’t wish even their worst enemy to live in. Because, as she soon learns about M’s existence (hence, the book’s title), “having been removed from reality, she had made it her life’s goal to find it again.” This means trying extra hard to do the things that are considered “normal” by those who haven’t been elevated to her godlike stature (cue the images from the “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” portion of Us Weekly). Things like walking her dogs, picking up her kids from school and meeting up with friends in “average” places. Though, of course, even the most average place isn’t really that in Paris, where the narrator and M both live. However, like the name “Natalie Portman,” “Paris” is never specifically mentioned either. Cusk instead offers some heavy-handed hints at the location (e.g., a reference to the much-hated-by-Parisians Montparnasse Tower).

And, by choosing to live in Paris, M is further, in the narrator’s estimation, unable to fully grasp most people’s “reality.” Particularly since she never even had to deal with much struggle for her art before becoming famous for it (though of course M says she’s merely a “vessel,” not an artist). So it is that the narrator assesses, “She had been spared the shame and stress of creativity at its intersection with reality. It might be said that creative people were people whose childhoods hadn’t ended. There was no particular basis for thinking this, other than the fact that most children created things and most adults didn’t.” In this manner, Cusk likens fame through creative success to invoking a kind of Peter Pan syndrome among those who achieve it. This not being helped by the fact that M (like Portman) became famous at a young age after starring in a film that is described very similarly to Portman’s own debut, Léon: The Professional.

Released in 1994, when Portman was thirteen (and filmed when she was twelve), her career only continued to ascend from there, thus, as Cusk sums it up, “removing her from reality” quite early on in life. To that point, she’s perhaps an even “worse case” of what it means to be famous, falling into the category of that Taylor Swift quote, “There’s this thing people say about celebrities, that they’re frozen at the age they got famous” (which also explains a lot about Swift). With regard to that “frozen-in-time” phenomenon, it can often be difficult, if not impossible, for celebrities to acknowledge the very concept of aging, let alone that they themselves have.

Perhaps the only time when an actor or actress—but especially the latter—is really forced to notice this is when they’re in the presence of someone younger, newer in their profession. As M is toward the end of the book when she meets a fellow actress at an expensive spa in preparation for a ceremony they’ll both be attending later. While talking to this actress is initially “fine” for M, “Suddenly M feels the cold and enigmatic presentiment of collapse. Lying beside this younger woman she feels her life spinning on its axis, shedding familiarity. It is as though she were seeing an ending suddenly coming into view. It is as though she has never realized until now how unsafe she is.” Unsafe from being ousted, eclipsed by a “younger edition” and unsafe in general from being constantly observed, with “this glass cube in the sky [where the spa is housed]… embod[ying] the danger.” However, what “M” a.k.a. Portman perhaps never knew to feel unsafe from was being written about in the razor-sharp autofiction style that Cusk has become known for.

However, the “auto” part is less prevalent here than it is in Cusk’s previous works, namely those that make up The Outline Trilogy: Outline, Transit and Kudos. Not to say this style is gone altogether. After all, she’s speaking from the vantage point of a biting, perspicacious writer, and uses elements from her own life within the book, even when applied to others. For example, when detailing a “literary event” that a “writer of some renown” is speaking at, the narrator tells of how it takes place at a high-end bookstore. So immediately, it sounds as if Cusk is drawing from her own appearance at 7L in 2024 for Chanel’s rendez-vous littéraire, hosted by Charlotte Casiraghi and Naomi Campbell. The latter feels like the inspiration for “the famous model” attending the event in Life of M, with Cusk writing, “…this event is being hosted by a fashion brand and they wish the model to be included. The purpose of the event is to discuss literature. The fashion brand has come up with the concept of staging literary evenings—or salons, as they call them—as a new form of diversion for its clients.” M is also a part of the discussion panel, with Cusk-as-narrator digging the knife by mentioning how she has a “well-known taste for literature.”

Considering that Natalie Portman has a book club called, “cutely,” Nat’s Book Club (which she started in 2019)—though it hasn’t quite ascended to Reese’s Book Club heights—Cusk’s “note” of it here is all the more stinging because Portman actually chose two of Cusk’s novels, Second Place and Parade, for her book club reading list. Even going so far as to gush, “Forever in awe of Rachel Cusk and the way she disrupts form and the conventions of storytelling.” And yes, she’s certainly continued to do that here, not just with her disorienting use of pronouns (often switching to a “we” format that appears, on a level, to speak to how the masses absorb a celebrity into themselves), but also by getting meta at the end with an exchange between M and the narrator that finds the former stating bluntly, “I don’t like the way you portray me… Actually, it’s hurtful.” (And with this dialogue, it’s hard not to picture her saying it in her Alice/Jane character tone from Closer.) M then adds, “You’ve made it seem like I lack humanity… You’ve made it seem like I’m unable to love.”

The narrator assures, “But it isn’t you… It isn’t anyone… You’re just playing a character… The character was invented by me. So if that’s true, then it’s me it’s true of.” In this regard, Cusk is absolving herself and the public of their projecting and often gross behavior when it comes to celebrities. Or maybe, if the rumors about Cusk and Portman being “friends” were true, it’s Cusk’s way of semi-apologizing within the text. However, Cusk and Portman were not known to be “friends” prior to the publication of Life of M, though they live in the same city and Portman has met Cusk before and effusively expressed her love for the author’s work. Most notably in a 2022 interview for British Vogue, commenting that Cusk is “genius” and that, “I’ve gotten so much out of her writing, just in terms of what it is to be an artist and a woman.”

Perhaps, someday, she’ll get the same out of Life of M, though it could take decades to see it that way. But, in the end, the “who is Cusk talking about” factor is never really the point in or of Life of M. Instead, the more glaring issue at hand is that a celebrity fundamentally becomes whatever the masses project onto them. An avatar for having no true self or sense of identity, as few people seem to anymore because they themselves are so visible in a climate where, as Bret Easton Ellis puts it in White, “We’ve all become actors.” And yes, it’s because of social media, because of being terminally online and terminally “documenting,” filming.

Ellis’ take on this matter thus cuts to the core of Life of M when he says in the same book, “…being an actor involves turning into a blank, hollowing yourself out so you can replace whatever was there with the character you’re playing next. What does it mean to be real as an actor? What does transparency mean if you’re essentially a vessel waiting to be filled again and again and again? Part of the actor’s immediate charm stems from an upbeat attitude they keep selling, one that masks their true selves. If you get to know an actor intimately you might or might not have access to that true self in private, but rarely will you see it in public, where the actor always continues to play a part. But most of us now lead lives on social media that are more performance based than we ever could have imagined…”

Ellis then concludes, “We seem to have entered precariously into a kind of totalitarianism that actually abhors free speech and punishes people for revealing their true selves. In other words: the actor’s dream.” Though, of course, the more accurate word to describe that type of prison is “nightmare.” Particularly since, the more that time wears on and the more that a larger number of people wake up to the, that’s right, reality that media in general and films in particular have always been the modern update to the “bread and circuses” approach to things, the more “ick factor” an actor (and anyone else “making art”) might encounter about doing it.

There comes another reflective moment early in Life of M where the narrator lambasts the very existence of film with the clinical appraisal,

Watching a film was a means of surrendering control over what could not in any case be controlled… Life was easier if you watched films, just as life was easier if you flew in airplanes. The same problems of time and space that arose when you flew somewhere, rather than traveling by land and sea, seemed to apply also to films. The reduction of the element of time relative to that of space created a moral imbalance that was also a liberating convenience. Reading books did not make life easier in the same way. It took time to read a book. Watching a film temporarily broke the power of time. This was one reason it had felt right not to watch too many of them, though most other people didn’t seem to see it that way. There was so much in the world already, so many problems that needed to be solved, without complicating things by reenacting what had already happened or was happening somewhere right now or might never happen.”

In other words, the narrator is not just effectively ridiculing the very existence of movies, but the actors, like M, who continue to prop up their legacy and their cultural value. Which has historically been just another way to keep the profits coming with the congratulatory excuse that one is “making art,” doing it “for art” (take, for instance, how MGM had the audacity to make “Ars gratia artis” part of its logo when it, nor any other studio has much adhered to that). Even though there comes a point in the book when even M must admit, “There’s no money in film anymore.”