Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection/Courtesy of Neon

Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Life of M, is the story of an incredible woman — an actress, both beautiful and smart, who is worldly and curious and bafflingly friends with the narrator, despite all of those things. Told in Cusk’s sparse prose and presumably operating in her typical semi-auto-fictional form, it’s hard not to read Life of M and wonder, well, who the hell is M? No Judi Dench in Bond films here — but the clues for M all lead in one pretty obvious direction, and that’s toward Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman.

Portman has stayed understandably tight-lipped about this whole thing, otherwise posting on Instagram as though it’s all business as usual. And why wouldn’t she? Though Life of M is critical about the world of celebrity, M comes off more or less okay — way better than a lot of other semi-fictional celebrities might. Still, how do we know it’s Portman and not, say, Charlize Theron or Nicole Kidman or Emma Stone? We don’t, really, especially if M is a true-blue fictional character, as Cusk alludes to in the book’s opening section. Still, here are the clues Cusk lays out for us to draw our own conclusions about who the mysterious M may be.

One of the reasons Cusk’s narrator strikes up a relationship with M is because they both happen to live in a chic European city. Though there are several European cities with cafés and rivers, Paris feels like the most obvious option here — as it is where Cusk is known to live. Portman, too, lives in Paris, where she has lived mostly full-time since 2014 and raises her children with now-ex-husband Benjamin Millepied. There are other actresses who live in Paris, but Cusk’s narrator implies at one point that M is a “foreigner.”

“Some years ago, while not quite still a young girl herself, M was chosen for the starring role in a film about a young girl chosen for a starring role in a ballet,” Cusk writes. There are, quite frankly, not really that many movies about ballet. It’s Black Swan, Center Stage, Center Stage 2, Billy Elliott, and what? The Red Shoes? Certainly the most high-profile among those would be Black Swan, for which Portman won an Oscar. “The film brought her a new kind of glory,” Cusk writes. “It was perhaps her highest achievement.” More compelling, however, is the way in which Cusk details how the ballet film mirrors M’s approach to performance: “The erasure of the boundary between M and her character was an obvious means of infusing a drop of human blood into her performance.”

An ongoing point of stress in M’s life is an unclear rift with a man the narrator frequently refers to as “this person.” It’s clear from Cusk’s language that there was some kind of separation between these two: “She has been advised to remain at all times positive and cheerful with this person, who treats her existence as an intentional and carefully planned affront to himself. He is permitted to insult her; she has been advised to turn the other cheek,” Cusk writes. While we don’t know if Portman’s relationship with ex-husband Millepied is so strained, we do know that an alleged affair may have led to their eventual separation. Part of why M is so stressed about her relationship with “this person” is because their relationship is “founded on criticism” — this would map somewhat clearly on the fact that Millepied left his then-fiancée for Portman after the two got together while working on Black Swan.

One of the strangest and most entertaining sections of Life of M occurs when Cusk details M slipping into a local repertory theater to catch a screening of “one of her films” by a director who “has a new film showing in the new mainstream cinemas.” The film begins with a shooting in a school — there is really only one Portman film in which this occurs, and that’s Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux, in which a young girl is nearly killed in a school shooting and is then launched into celebrity after writing a song about the event. In the film’s second half, Portman plays the adult version of the pop star, foulmouthed and embittered from her years in the industry. The timing would make sense. If we imagine that Life of M takes place between 2023 and 2024, that would line up with the release of Corbet’s The Brutalist. Sitting in the theater, M’s take on her film with this director is the thrill of violence, the recollection that she was truly acting. “What she sees is someone who has been devastated by fame,” Cusk writes of M’s character in the film.

At the end of the novel, Cusk’s narrator details M’s “big dogs.”

Portman, well … you can see these two for yourself.

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