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Rachel Cusk\u2019s new novel, Life of M<\/a>, is the story of an incredible woman \u2014 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\u2019s sparse prose and presumably operating in her typical semi-auto-fictional form, it\u2019s hard not to read Life of M and wonder, well, who the hell is M? No Judi Dench in Bond films here \u2014 but the clues for M all lead in one pretty obvious direction, and that\u2019s toward Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman.<\/p>\n Portman has stayed understandably tight-lipped about this whole thing, otherwise posting on Instagram as though it\u2019s all business as usual. And why wouldn\u2019t she? Though Life of M is critical about the world of celebrity, M comes off more or less okay \u2014 way better than a lot of other semi-fictional celebrities might. Still, how do we know it\u2019s Portman and not, say, Charlize Theron or Nicole Kidman or Emma Stone? We don\u2019t, really, especially if M is a true-blue fictional character, as Cusk alludes to in the book\u2019s opening section. Still, here are the clues Cusk lays out for us to draw our own conclusions about who the mysterious M may be.<\/p>\n One of the reasons Cusk\u2019s 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 caf\u00e9s and rivers, Paris feels like the most obvious option here \u2014 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\u2019s narrator implies at one point that M is a \u201cforeigner.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSome 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,\u201d Cusk writes. There are, quite frankly, not really that many movies about ballet. It\u2019s 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. \u201cThe film brought her a new kind of glory,\u201d Cusk writes. \u201cIt was perhaps her highest achievement.\u201d More compelling, however, is the way in which Cusk details how the ballet film mirrors M\u2019s approach to performance: \u201cThe erasure of the boundary between M and her character was an obvious means of infusing a drop of human blood into her performance.\u201d<\/p>\n An ongoing point of stress in M\u2019s life is an unclear rift with a man the narrator frequently refers to as \u201cthis person.\u201d It\u2019s clear from Cusk\u2019s language that there was some kind of separation between these two: \u201cShe 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,\u201d Cusk writes. While we don\u2019t know if Portman\u2019s relationship with ex-husband Millepied is so strained, we do know that an alleged affair may have led to their eventual separation<\/a>. Part of why M is so stressed about her relationship with \u201cthis person\u201d is because their relationship is \u201cfounded on criticism\u201d \u2014 this would map somewhat clearly on the fact that Millepied left his then-fianc\u00e9e for Portman after the two got together while working on Black Swan.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cone of her films\u201d by a director who \u201chas a new film showing in the new mainstream cinemas.\u201d The film begins with a shooting in a school \u2014 there is really only one Portman film in which this occurs, and that\u2019s Brady Corbet\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s The Brutalist. Sitting in the theater, M\u2019s take on her film with this director is the thrill of violence, the recollection that she was truly acting. \u201cWhat she sees is someone who has been devastated by fame,\u201d Cusk writes of M\u2019s character in the film.<\/p>\n At the end of the novel, Cusk\u2019s narrator details M\u2019s \u201cbig dogs.\u201d<\/p>\n Portman, well \u2026 you can see these two for yourself.<\/p>\n Sign up for the Vulture Daily<\/p>\n An entertainment newsletter for the pop-culture obsessed.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n