{"id":6364,"date":"2026-08-21T14:06:35","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T14:06:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/relocationobserver.com\/?p=6364"},"modified":"2026-08-21T14:06:35","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T14:06:35","slug":"natalie-portman-at-the-center-of-literary-furor-as-rachel-cusks-life-of-m-nears-release","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/relocationobserver.com\/?p=6364","title":{"rendered":"Natalie Portman at the Center of Literary Furor as Rachel Cusk\u2019s \u2018Life of M\u2019 Nears Release"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\tFor decades, Natalie Portman has been one of our most cerebral stars. A 1999 Vanity Fair cover, promoting \u201cThe Phantom Menace,\u201d asked whether the then-17-year-old might \u201cchoose Harvard over Hollywood.\u201d She managed to do both, earning an Ivy League degree and an Oscar. Her characters in movies from \u201cJackie\u201d to \u201cMay December\u201d are often overthinkers, and her Instagram book club picks tend toward high literature.\u00a0
\u00a0
Who better, then, to serve as the heroine of a Rachel Cusk novel?\u00a0\u00a0
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Cusk, the experimental novelist, is set to publish \u201cLife of M,\u201d about an unnamed actress coping with feelings of alienation and depersonalization, on Aug. 25. Cusk\u2019s work, like the well-loved \u201cOutline\u201d trilogy, favors deep excavation of inner turmoil over what might be called \u201cplot,\u201d and \u201cLife of M\u201d is no exception. Still, the obvious similarities to the known facts of Portman\u2019s life have earned the book plenty of buzz.\u00a0\u00a0
\u00a0
To wit: M, a former child star who received her greatest acclaim for playing a ballerina, is raising children, seemingly solo, in Paris. All of this checks out, and Portman\u2019s putative connection to Cusk \u2014 she selected Cusk\u2019s last novel, 2024\u2019s \u201cParade,\u201d for Natalie\u2019s Book Club, and both actress and author live in Paris \u2014 lends the enterprise a juicy overlay of gossip.\u00a0\u00a0
\u00a0
There\u2019s no public information indicating Portman\u2019s involvement in the project, or whether she approved it at all. (Portman\u2019s rep and the book\u2019s publicist at Farrar, Straus and Giroux did not respond to requests for comment.) And if people are reading \u201cLife of M\u201d as a document of truth, it may be in part because the novel so confidently places its reader within restricted access zones. We see M through the eyes of a narrator, an unnamed person who has obtained M\u2019s permission to document her life. And so we accompany M to a spa, where she and a younger actress chitchat about their peers and discuss Hollywood\u2019s gender pay gap, and to an interview at a chic restaurant, where she observes strangers snapping her picture. The access Cusk grants extends deep into M\u2019s mind as well: With her friend, M ponders how she might help a new generation of actresses despite her own \u201cennui\u201d about the industry; with the journalist interviewing her, M is burdened \u201cby the impossibility of anyone ever understanding what she is.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0
\u00a0
The project of this book is to help us to know a person who rejects examination, just as journalists have struggled to crack Portman, who avoids discussing her personal life in interviews. \u201cLife of M\u201d is not the sort of novel that one can \u201cspoil,\u201d but suffice it to say that M ultimately makes her displeasure at the narrator\u2019s project plain: Being under a writer\u2019s gaze is, for her, intolerable. M comes by this aversion to fame honestly. We\u2019re informed that \u201cstarring in a film as a child had immediately brought her childhood to an end,\u201d and that press coverage of her entanglements as an adult have strained her relationship with her family. She has constructed a series of walls, and within them, she mournfully wonders why, as Portman\u2019s fellow former child performer Britney Spears once sang, these tears come at night.\u00a0\u00a0
\u00a0
Portman may be totally uninvolved with this project, although if she were<\/em>, it wouldn\u2019t be the first time she and an acclaimed novelist indulged a creative project. (In 2016, Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer furnished their personal email exchanges to The New York Times\u2019 T Magazine, which published them alongside a Portman fashion shoot.) But \u201cLife of M\u201d succeeds as a novel, if not as celebrity journalism. M\u2019s coldness and hauteur \u2014 we\u2019re told she is \u201cboth overwhelmed by and indifferent to certain aspects of normality, so that she can never actually be normal\u201d \u2014 go so far that one seeks to put a face on them, and so one may well imagine Portman\u2019s. But a point \u201cLife of M\u201d works to make is that the hardened, remote M is the creature that our relentless scrutiny made. And reading a work of fiction as if it might unlock a movie star never named in its pages would only strengthen her resolve to hide all but her star persona away.\u00a0
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Read more Canada\u2019s H264 Nabs Colombia\u2019s \u2018Where the River Begins\u2019 Ahead of Toronto Fest World Premiere<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rachel Cusk’s new book is all about an actress living in Paris \u2014 and it’s an unflattering depiction<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6363,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4929,4930,4931],"class_list":["post-6364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film","tag-life-of-m","tag-natalie-portman-2","tag-rachel-cusk"],"yoast_head":"\nNatalie Portman at the Center of Literary Furor as Rachel Cusk\u2019s \u2018Life of M\u2019 Nears Release - Relocation Observer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/relocationobserver.com\/?p=6364\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Natalie Portman at the Center of Literary Furor as Rachel Cusk\u2019s \u2018Life of M\u2019 Nears Release - 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