Author Rachel Cusk's upcoming novel "Life of M" maps so closely onto Natalie Portman's biography that sources say the actress finds the whole affair "annoying", and insists the two women were never close friends.
The book, a slim 100-page work scheduled for release August 25, centers on a character called M: a former child star living in Paris who once trained alongside "starved and chain-smoking ballerinas" for a film about ballet, endured the sexualization of her early career, and watched her marriage collapse. Every detail tracks with Portman's public life, her Oscar-winning turn in "Black Swan," her childhood debut in "Léon: The Professional" at age 12, and her March 2024 divorce from ballet dancer Benjamin Millepied after 11 years of marriage.
Cusk, an award-winning British novelist who also lives in Paris, has made no public effort to deny the connection. Neither has her publisher. Representatives for both Cusk and Portman did not respond to Page Six's request for comment.
People close to Portman pushed back hard on any suggestion the actress cooperated with the book or that the two women share a meaningful personal bond. A source described as knowing the situation told Page Six the pair have crossed paths only a handful of times.
"They hardly know each other... they have met maybe five or six times, total. Rachel appeared on Natalie's Instagram book club, and Natalie's always been a fan of her writing, but they don't go out and they don't hang out together."
That same source went further, calling the marketed narrative of a fractured friendship a sales tactic.
"The idea that they're close friends being torn apart is a fabrication of a publisher trying to sell a book."
Portman did select Cusk's novel "Second Place" for her online book club in September 2021, calling Cusk "one of my favorite writers." She picked another Cusk title, "Parade," as her June 2024 book club selection. But admiring someone's prose from a public platform is a long way from granting that person license to fictionalize your private life.
A publishing source offered a blunter assessment of Cusk's method: "This is how she goes about her writing. Rachel steals from people's lives and mines acquaintances." That source added that Cusk and her publisher are "narrowly skating the line of not trying to hide who they make it out to be, even if they don't comment on it."
The controversy around "Life of M" is not the first time Cusk's work has drawn accusations of lifting real people's lives without permission. In 2009, her memoir "The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy" was pulled from shelves and pulped after a tourist she had written about threatened a libel and privacy lawsuit. The dispute ended in an out-of-court settlement and the destruction of the entire first print run.
That episode established a pattern. Cusk draws from the people around her, sometimes lightly, sometimes in ways those people find objectionable, and her publishers absorb the fallout. The difference this time is the scale of the subject. Portman is not an anonymous tourist in Tuscany. She is a 45-year-old Academy Award winner, the longtime face of Dior, and a public figure whose childhood exploitation has been a matter of serious cultural conversation for decades.
Valerie Stivers, a senior editor at UnHerd who first reported on the book's apparent connection to Portman, laid out the parallels plainly. She told Page Six that "the character, M, is obviously based on her, and has captured something real about Portman's quest to be normal."
Consider the specifics. M is a former child star. Portman became famous at 12 in "Léon: The Professional," a 1994 film in which her mother, Shelley Stevens, intervened to have certain scenes involving the then-child actress and her 44-year-old co-star Jean Reno removed from the final cut. Cusk's novel includes a similar episode, scenes between M and an older male co-star that were later excised.
M trained obsessively for a ballet film. Portman spent roughly a year training with the New York City Ballet for "Black Swan," the 2011 role that won her the Oscar. Cusk writes that M's "body began to mimic theirs. She became obsessive about her attempts to master certain postures and sequences." The novel also references M's romance with a figure from the ballet world, paralleling Portman's relationship with Millepied, which began on the "Black Swan" set while he was in a long-term relationship with ballerina Isabella Boylston.
M smiles out from billboards "wreathed in the pink flowers of spring." Portman has been the face of Miss Dior for years, and new Dior and Tiffany campaigns are expected this fall.
Even M's emotional arc mirrors Portman's public statements. Portman told actress Jenna Ortega in an April 2025 discussion for "Interview" magazine: "There's a public understanding of me that's different from who I am. I've talked about it a little before, about how, as a kid, I was really sexualized, which I think happens to a lot of young girls who are onscreen. I felt very scared by it." Cusk's M tells the narrator "that starring in a film had immediately brought her childhood to an end."
Stivers argued that Cusk is not simply mining gossip. She framed the novel as something more deliberate and more unsettling.
"She's using Natalie as a literary stand in for elite culture and elite people and as an opportunity to develop her idea that maybe 'the self' doesn't exist. Who better than an actress to symbolize that? Is it lies, is it true, it doesn't matter. Cusk thinks we're all actors. She's always playing games with identity."
But Stivers also acknowledged the human cost of those games. She noted that Cusk's narrator reaches a pointed conclusion about M, that she is failing in her quest for normalcy and sincerity. Cusk writes of M: "Even love 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."
Stivers put it directly: "Outside of the bounds of art, if they were friends, that conclusion is pretty mean."
A French source who knows both women took a different view, defending Cusk's right to draw from life. "Novelists always draw from their own experiences to create characters, and Rachel is no different, she's also one of the best in the business," the source said, adding that Cusk is "under no obligation, legal or moral, to explain where she gets her inspiration from."
Sources close to Portman described the actress as unbothered in any lasting way. A Hollywood source said: "Natalie is pretty comfortable with who she is. Her friends know who she is. I doubt this is keeping her up at night."
Another source close to Portman painted a fuller picture of where the actress stands. Portman, now 45, is expecting her third child, her first with French musician Tanguy Destable. She has two children with Millepied: a son, Aleph, 15, and a daughter, Amalia, 9. Beyond the Dior and Tiffany campaigns, she is set to star in Lena Dunham's film "Good Sex," expected early next year.
That source was emphatic about Portman's current state: "Natalie is in an amazing place in her life. She has an incredible partner and very close girlfriends; Rachel Cusk is not one of them, contrary to what she might like you to believe."
Still, the novel's final passage carries a sting that no amount of professional success fully neutralizes. In the book's closing lines, M confronts the narrator directly: "I don't like the way you portray me. You've made it seem like I lack humanity. You've made it seem like I'm unable to love."
Whether Cusk intended those words as fiction, philosophy, or provocation, they land on a real woman's doorstep, a woman who, by every available account, never asked to be the subject.
There is a word for using someone's life as raw material without their consent and then hiding behind the label of art. The literary world may call it genius. Most people would call it something else entirely.
