There is a specific kind of betrayal reserved for when you hand a mirror to a friend and they smash it on the ground while you’re still looking into it.
Natalie Portman is reportedly furious.
She allegedly allowed her friend, novelist Rachel Cusk, to use Portman’s own life as the jumping-off point for Cusk’s new fictional work. The book? Life of M. It arrives August 25. The premise? A movie star who feels like a ghost in her own reality.
This isn’t just gossip from a tabloid fringe. Valerie Stivers, editor at Unherd, laid out the messy dynamics in a column that’s circulating through New York literary circles with alarming speed. The consensus? Portman made a mistake.
A High-Stakes Literary Favor
Portman, 45, has long admired Cusk. We’re talking deep admiration. In 2022, Portman selected Cusk’s Second Place for her Nat’s Book Club. She did it again in 2024 for Parade. On Instagram, she called Cusk “forever in awe,” praising her ability to disrupt traditional storytelling forms.
You don’t give that kind of platform to someone you don’t trust. Or so the logic goes.
Then came Life of M.
The synopsis, pulled directly from Macmillan Publishers, describes the protagonist M as a face so recognizable she has ceased to be a person. People obey her. Spaces bend for her. She walks her dogs like everyone else, but the laws of reality seem to melt away around her.
“It is hard not to feel ugly next to ‘M,’ hard not to feel insignificant. But what truth… about the very experience of living might this proximity allow the writer to capture?”
Read that last line again. It sounds like an authorial statement. It reads like an apology. Or a warning.
The Warning That Was Ignored
Stivers argues that anyone who truly understands Rachel Cusk’s modus operandi would never let her write about them.
“No one in her right mind… would allow her to write about her,” Stivers writes. Not when you have a public image to protect. Not when you value your own self-preservation.
“A Cusk book about you is never going be flattering.”
Why? Because Cusk’s work mines the awkward, the ugly, the uncomfortable truths of proximity. If you are the subject, you become a foil for the writer’s existential crisis. You are the bright light that makes the narrator feel insignificant. You are the canvas.
In Life of M, a writer gets close to M. They want to understand who she really is. They find that M is untouchable. They feel small. They write it down.
Stivers claims that biographical parallels in the text are glaring. M lives in an unnamed European city. So does Portman (Paris, since 2014). Cusk lives there too (since 2022). The narrator’s observations allegedly mirror Portman’s own dissatisfaction and sense of betrayal at seeing her life turned into fiction.
Is it real? Or is it just good fiction based on a real friendship? Neither Cusk nor Portman has commented. Silence is loud, though.
The Léon Shadow
There are details in Life of M that hit uncomfortably close to home regarding Portman’s early career.
The synopsis mentions M’s first film script contained scenes where the child protagonist appeared to invite sexual interaction with the male lead. These scenes were cut after the child’s mother objected.
Think about that.
Portman rose to global fame in Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional. She was 11 and 12. She played a girl who forms a complex, uncomfortable bond with an adult hitman played by Jean Reno. The film sexualized her youth in ways that have haunted her career since.
Portman has publicly discussed her fear of being sexualized as a child because of this role. She has spoken about the discomfort, the violation, the way the industry treated a prepubescent girl like an adult prop.
Now, Cusk’s fictionalized counterpart, M, goes through something eerily similar in her origin story. A child actor. A script with inappropriate content. A mother’s objection. A cut scene.
Did Cusk read the room wrong? Did Portman hand over the keys to a house she didn’t realize was being renovated into a museum of its own awkwardness?
The Fallout
The book comes out in late August. The rumors are already heating up. Stivers says the final pages depict the actress’s “dissatisfaction,” describing it as “true to life.”
We are left with a portrait of two women in Paris, separated by fame, bound by friendship, and divided by the act of writing itself. One observes. One is observed. The observer writes. The observed burns.
It raises a question we usually ignore in our love of literary generosity: What do we owe our friends when their art requires their sacrifice?
Portman wanted to support Cusk. Cusk made a book. The result is a mirror that reflects not who Portman is, but who she appears to be from the outside—untouchable, artificial, and utterly alone in a crowd.
The book hits shelves soon. Let’s see if the reflection holds.
