(Audio) Book Review: Life of M by Rachel Cusk

I received an Advance Listening Copy of this book thanks to the publisher and Libro.fm. All opinions are my own.

Guaranteed that if this book had been longer than 5 hours listening time, I would not have finished it. I haven’t read Rachel Cusk before so I have no idea if Life of M is indicative of her work in general but, my goodness, it is not for me.

We have an unnamed narrator who sometimes speaks in first person and sometimes in first person plural (But who is the “we”???? It makes no sense when you are discussing a childhood!). The narrator is an author, I guess, maybe Rachel Cusk, who decides to write a book about a famous actor she sort of knows and has met a few times. The actor is very famous and has been since she was a child. Sometimes we view her through the narrator’s lens and sometimes we are simply watching the actor, “M”, from a sort of close up third person narration. Sometimes we’re somewhere else entirely and, honestly, I’m not sure where.

M’s life is not ordinary and she knows this and knows that this is because she has been in the public eye for so long. She performs her life, for herself, for others. She seems neither happy nor unhappy. The narrator seems fairly unhappy and when we see her through the eye of that third person narration, we are shown a stressed-out, overwhelmed woman who is, at least, living a real life compared to M’s artificial one.

The “draw” of this book is supposedly that the character of M is based on Natalie Portman. The basic outline of M’s life and the movies the book references her as having acted in (all unnamed but a couple described) do align with Portman. Not being much of a cinephile, I’m not sure I would have made that connection if it weren’t being brought up every time this book is mentioned. Readers hoping for scintillating details of Portman’s life won’t find them here. They won’t even find scintillating details about M’s life. To be honest, Life of M makes it all look pretty boring. M struggles to connect with people and we learn almost nothing about her personal life. It wasn’t until almost the end of the book that we learn she has children and dogs. I think those might be true facts about Portman’s life but they are also true facts about my own so that isn’t much to build on. I do recall watching an episode of “Hot Ones” with Natalie Portman and being impressed by how clearly she kept herself under control throughout. She struck me as someone with a lot of media training, who had been in the public eye for a long time.

While the portrait of M as shown here isn’t necessarily a flattering one, I would argue that it’s too sparse to be anything. We don’t learn anything about M and we don’t watch her change or develop in any way. It’s like, dare I say it, simply observing someone on screen except instead of a film, they’re just going about their day-to-day. There’d be a sense of voyeurism except that there’s no intimacy on display here.

So maybe that’s what Cusk wants to show us, I’m not sure. I don’t think I’m a reader who necessarily needs to be constantly entertained but for most of this reading experience I found myself wondering, “What is the point of this and why am I here?”