When a Friend Becomes a Book

By Andy — 2026-07-29 — Literary News

I watched someone find out their friend was writing about them. Not as a confession, not as a warning. As a column.

That's where we are with Rachel Cusk's Life of M. The novelist—famous for taking the people around her and refining them into cold, unsparing prose—has apparently written a novel about Natalie Portman. This would be worth noting even if Portman hadn't spent the last few years selecting Cusk's books for her Instagram book club, hosting her at readings, insisting on how much she loved the way Cusk disrupts storytelling.

The details are absurd enough to be real. The fictional actress M is a child star, a famous face, a Dior model living in an unnamed European city. She was in a Lolita-adjacent film young. So was Portman, basically, if you squint at her early work.

But here's where it lands differently.

In Cusk's telling, M comes across as tense, myopic, alienated. Not a sympathetic read. The novel ends with M's dissatisfaction and betrayal at the finished product—and sources close to the actress say that part's also true.

This isn't Cusk's first time.

In 2009, her memoir The Last Supper had its first print run pulped after someone recognized themselves and threatened to sue. English vacationers she'd written about in Italy came forward with lawyers. She bounced back. She always does.

The irony is monstrous and probably intentional.

Cusk's whole point—the one embedded in Life of M, the one that's made her Outline trilogy what it is—is that identity doesn't really exist. It's a fiction we tell ourselves. It melts under enough scrutiny. So when Portman reads herself in these pages and feels betrayed at being "true to life," Cusk's narrator can turn around and say: well, that's the whole problem, isn't it?

Except that reasoning works better on a page than it does at dinner with someone you thought was your friend.

What's striking is that both Cusk and Portman live in Paris. They see the same people. They move in overlapping circles. Portman didn't meet a novelist in passing. She met someone in her actual life and invited her to write her autobiography. According to reports, she gave permission. Then she apparently changed her mind when she saw what permission actually bought.

There's something about watching someone discover the difference between admiring a writer and being written by one.

Cusk hasn't commented. Neither has Portman, officially. But the novel comes out August 25. Everyone will know by then.

Maybe don't hand your life to a novelist.