Life of M opens with a pitch: “A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography.” M is “a good sport” and tells the unnamed narrator, a writer, to “just make it up.” The narrator lives as an expat in a cosmopolitan city and is seemingly successful enough to be mutual friends with a famous movie star. M’s incredible beauty, poise, and fame make the narrator feel, in comparison, ugly, uncomfortable, and vulnerable—yet also curious about M’s completely alien way of life. The narrator notices how M’s celebrity renders reality “malleable”; doors open for her both literally and figuratively, “as though M were always in a film, even when she wasn’t.”
However, the narrator’s likewise unnamed partner falls ill with a mysterious, grave illness. The narrator’s life becomes defined by the rituals of visiting hours: walking to the hospital each day, watching the bed, and passing time in attendant waiting. Eventually, the narrator explains that the couple will need to leave the city to recuperate, and M responds with sympathy and understanding. Upon parting, the narrator realizes that M’s larger-than-life persona cordons off the possibility of authenticity in their interactions: “I could not be myself around M. She was friendly, generous, disarmingly modest, yet everything I did or said in her company was false. It was as if I was acting, while M came across as authentic and real. It was as if she was the only one good enough at acting to attain reality.” Already the boundary between M’s life and her work is presented as so unstable that it is contagious. Faced with M’s celebrity, even the narrator—who didn’t know who M was when they first met—questions the boundary between authenticity and performance.
After just a few pages, any creative collaboration with M is abandoned, and the narrator evacuates the text. The rest of the novel consists of two alternating narrative perspectives that unfold across passages lasting a couple of pages each. One perspective uses the first-person plural to narrate the movement of residents around a major metropolitan city (almost certainly Cusk’s own Paris, with its “big ugly tower” dominating the skyline). The narrator and partner are no longer in the text’s diegesis, but they appear to meld into one under this “we”—the narrational pronoun of a middle-aged expat couple, given to writing in notebooks in cafés, visiting museums, and consulting psychics. The rhythms of daily life open up to existential questioning, nostalgia, and reflection: “We walk our dogs beside the river, striding quickly next to the water. Our bodies need to be exercised. Our bodies are not young and they are not old, they are in some sense ageless or perhaps simply obsolete.” The city serves as backdrop for the couple’s various patterns, and special attention is given to its cruel proximity: some people sleep on the streets, while others (“we”) step over them; Cusk wryly notes the other quotidian contradictions of city life: “Men on motorbikes and electric scooters fly along… at dangerous speeds. They wear hard shiny helmets to protect their heads, though the heads of the people walking next to them on the pavements and crossing the streets are bare.” In moments like this, Cusk effects a sort of urban choreography. These passages chart the movement of bodies in space and time as they navigate the contours of city life and respond to the movements of other people.
The other perspective is similarly concerned with the built environment. In these passages, an omniscient voice catalogues the makeup of various spaces in painstaking detail. Each begins with a declarative statement: “It is a hotel room in a foreign city.” Or
It is an office, square and high-ceilinged, with walls of panelled wood. It is on the first floor of a fine mansion on an elegant street in the old part of the city. The first floor is reached by a polished dark oak staircase that rises up from the ground-floor reception rooms. The panels in the office are of a different wood…
Eventually, M appears to populate these different spaces, as if they were sets for a performance. She visits this office preserved in a museum to research for a role, but doesn’t appear in the description of this room for five long paragraphs: “The bookcases, to which for a few moments M has given an appearance of light interest, contain many books about history and geography…” By giving design, layout, and architecture of interior and exterior spaces as much attention as the human activity that occurs within them, Cusk suggests these elements are equally consequential in creating meaning.
In another scene, M participates in a brand-sponsored literary “salon,” in which she features in conversation alongside an author, journalist, and model. A team of people works to ensure the aesthetic precision of the bookstore in which the conversation occurs: “various volumes are taken from the shelves and arranged in piles on the low table with an artful carelessness. No one troubles themselves about the fact that the volumes are new and have evidently never been opened.” Within this manicured version of a real bookstore, the women have a rehearsed discussion in front of cameras before conducting the “real” discussion for a live audience; having already been performed, the “real” dialogue emerges as stilted. Here, the lengthy defamiliarized, itemized description works in the novel’s favor: Cusk can expose the absurd constructedness of the “set” because, in this case, it is quite literally a set. Otherwise, though, this style of scene-setting often verges on tedium: the distant voice, sans movement to fill up these spaces, renders these settings two-dimensional, fuzzy in the mind’s eye despite the exhaustive detail.
M too offers little in terms of narrative momentum. Just like the “shape” of spaces, M’s “shape”—her expressions and gestures, and the gap between her inner self and its outer appearance—is described with the same omniscience. In the office, for example, she performs even without the camera’s gaze: “M behaves charmingly toward the curator. She nods and smiles.” M moves through other spaces—offices, restaurants, hotels, spas, bookstores, and trailers—with the same detached self-awareness. Although she has various, ostensibly upsetting encounters with friends or colleagues, her maintained stoicism constitutes both a performance and a personality. Even in moments that may engender vulnerability, like in an encounter with a vindictive ex or in a theater workshop where participants are prompted to tell a secret, she neither reacts nor lets anything slip from behind the mask of her own face. M as a subject is inseparable from her vocation as an actor and the shadow of her public persona—a phenomenon she is aware of, even suffers from, and yet actively maintains.
An actor since childhood, M tells the narrator in one of their few conversations that she does not consider herself to be an artist. Rather, she figures herself as a mere “element in the creations of others.” Only through fame has she gained the power to begin to shape her life, using it to try to make her life “seem more normal.” But between chatting with nannies in school pickup lines, or coffees or dinners with old friends, she is unable to achieve normality—she only further entrenches herself in performance: “It is her own self that is scripted.” The narrative mentions bad publicity and alludes to personal troubles, but it withholds these insights into M’s “real life,” focusing instead on her constructed response.
Overall, both Life of M and M’s life emerge through the accumulation of these interactions between her body and the spaces she moves through. This is an alchemic process, sketched through these passages of cityscapes and interiors that resemble visualization exercises or guided meditations. The narrative offers little in the way of dramatic confrontation, change, or revelation—at least, that is, until the novel’s curious final scene.
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The publication of Cusk’s Outline (2014) marked her turn from the explicitly personal: “my mode of autobiography had come to an end.” This formal shift is a direct response to the “creative death” (not to mention the social and public controversy) she experienced after the publication of Aftermath (2012), an extremely personal book about her divorce. Outline presents instead the narrator’s “annihilated perspective”; rather than driving the plot in a traditional sense, she instead serves as a conduit for conversation, interaction, and confrontation with other characters.
Following the Outline trilogy—the last novel, Kudos, came out in 2018—Cusk’s novels demonstrate a consistent interest in art forms other than literature. Inspired by Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir about D.H. Lawrence’s maligned stay at an artist colony, Second Place (2021) follows a painter, “L,” whose work inspires an ambiguous, dark interest in the narrator and disrupts the latter’s domestic life. Parade (2024) chronicles separate narratives about separate artists, each monikered “G,” who in turn resemble Georg Baselitz, Louise Bourgeois, and Éric Rohmer. In an interview with the New Yorker, Cusk made explicit her interest in probing the dynamic between creator and creation across different mediums: “Language is essentially incriminating: writers are identified mercilessly with their works, yet there is an invisibility—or almost a protective cordon—around the visual artist, to the extent that a biographical approach to the visual arts has been and possibly still is seen as basically unacceptable.” With recent novels focused on visual art, Cusk seems to be writing against this interpolation; if there is a link between writer and writing, her work suggests, then there must also be a correlative relationship between painter and painting. These portraits of artists do not follow a Barthesian schematic that divorces the artist from their art; rather, she insists an artist’s life necessarily informs their work, and vice versa.
Life of M follows Cusk’s post-Outline output as an extension and escalation of these dually committed inquiries into novelistic form and the relationship between creator and creation. However, Life of M shifts the central medium to acting and performance—a narrative shift that activates a thematic shift. In visual art, as in literature, the art object and artist are literally separated. In performance, however, art and the artist are the same: body and face are both output and material. By casting an actor into the protagonist role, Cusk forces a confrontation with the impossibility of separating creator and creation. M’s characterization demonstrates that this inseparability also leads to a slippage in identity: she cannot be separated, nor interpreted separately, from her art. Even more so, the nature of her celebrity means that the world shapes itself around M—just as she shapes herself around the world.
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The novel’s third part marks the return of the first-person narrator, who has just shown M “some of what only I was referring to as our project”—the “project” being what we have just read. The “real” M disapproves of the work: the narrative portrait is factually inaccurate and offensive in its unfeelingness. She concedes coldly that the narrator can do whatever with the writing, as long as her name isn’t used.
Like Portnoy’s Complaint, the novel ends with a punchline, delivered in the form of a question from M: “This might sound stupid,” she says, “but I’ve been wondering. Are you a guy or a girl?” The novel assumes readers consider the narrator to be female; this interpretation is supported by the fact that all of Cusk’s previous first-person narrators are women, and is reinforced by the narrator’s self-comparison to M, which tends to focus on appearance. This provocative delivery confronts readers with the fact that the narrator’s gender, like their name, has gone unremarked upon. With this, Cusk throws into question both the “shape” the narrator has embodied throughout the entire novel, and the ways that this shape is constructed from readers’ expectations based on past experiences and stereotypes. Yet this sort of feminist twist doesn’t quite land when so much of the novel strips its titular woman down to her body, clothes, and face, refusing her interiority or agency and using these embodied features instead to stand for her whole self, to the actual M’s dismay.
In the project’s conception of M, the actor “visualizes a brick wall” in order to go to sleep. She chips away at the brick wall, loosening the mortar around a single brick and pushing it to reveal a “small rectangle of blank white light.” She continues to chip away at the wall until the bricks fall away and “when it is big enough, she crawls through it.” Like this wall of bricks, Life of M presents a constructed fortress around its titular character. This is the culmination of the performance—it is her art, and also her life.
Amelia Anthony
Amelia Anthony is a writer from Los Angeles living in Brooklyn.