Rachel Cusk’s Life of M and Fictionalizing the Other in Place of the Self
There is always a buzz around a new Rachel Cusk novel—her name trends on Substack, The New Yorker drops an Instagram post, literary circles murmur. It’s well deserved excitement for an author who has spent over two decades making literary form itself a hot topic. However, the press around her upcoming novel, Life of M, has ballooned and curdled into a media frenzy that spans tabloid diatribes and critic hit-pieces. The novel portrays an author who has decided to pay close attention to and document the life of their friend, M, a monumental movie-star and globally distinguished A-lister. As such, the media has taken to solving the case of who this actress truly is and what this “thinly veiled” portrait can tell us about her inner life. It is a now familiar mode of reading, sharpened by internet-sleuths and stan-account forensics, in which a book loosely attached to a famous person becomes something to be mined for confirmable facts. But the question of whether M is mirrored on a real person should not matter to the reader, as it did not matter to the author. Life of M is no celebrity exposé. In fact, it is less a portrayal of an actress than a study of an author, interrogating how and why the author invents M. It is a meditation on the limits of knowing one another and the inventions we make in spite of those constraints.
Cusk focuses on the author’s invention of M from the first line. “A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea. She’s a good sport. Would you just make it up? she said.” Immediately, the author is shown proposing an autobiography that is ghost written—and therefore not “auto”—while M suggests it be made up and therefore not biographical. Part joke, part introductory tension, this oxymoronic banter sets up the entire premise of the book’s metafictional form. The lines between fact and fiction are muddied—Cusk portrays an author who portrays M. Whether you believe that author is Cusk herself is up to you. However, interpreting M’s life as a portrayal of a real actress’s experience is a lost cause, as the story of M you are reading was one admittedly invented by the author. The life of M you read is not even true to the character M, let alone an realized person.
With this realization, Life of M’s subject starts to come into focus: the invention of the other. Specifically, what it means to build another person’s interior life out of your own perceptions, and what happens when the builder gets lost in their own construction. Cusk has the author write about a star, not to slander or dwell on the idea of fame itself, but because fame is the perfect context for constructing a fictional idea of someone.
The author starts assembling M’s life based on their mutual interactions before extending their source material to M’s films, interviews, secondhand accounts, and, without breaking stride, their own imagination stated in the affirmative. From there on, the author’s access is infinite and the two travel everywhere together. The scenes of M’s life, ornate apartments and glitzy limousines, are vividly depicted. These settings are perhaps the only confirmable aspects of M’s true life. Regardless, M’s actions and reactions are incredibly lucid and equally cold. She is callous and removed. Yet, much of her opaqueness is a natural result of her being perceived from the outside. The author’s “autobiography” cannot grasp the true essence of M’s interiority.
Partway through the book, the narration shifts from a singular “I” and “she” into the collective “we” and “our.” This “we” is purposefully unstable and unreliable, as the author has stopped being able to locate the limits of their own identity. Somewhere in the process of constructing M, they have lost their own sense of self. The author fails to actually reach M’s interior life and can only construct their own idea of M, one which they project themselves onto.
Cusk’s focus here is inherently phenomenological. For millennia philosophers, such as Husserl, have grappled with what it means for one consciousness to encounter another: if I can only verify my own reality through my own cogitation and experiences, how am I supposed to verify the reality of another without that access? Cusk’s message echoes their conclusions: we never have direct access to anyone else’s inner life the way we have access to our own, and so the perception of another person becomes accessible only through the realm of our own experience. From what we already know of ourselves (our own expectations, wants, fears, etc.) we build a version of the other, and project ourselves outward.
The natural implication follows: the depth and clarity of what we can know about another is bound to the depth and clarity of what we know about ourselves. Genuine empathy with another requires a functioning fluency with one’s own interiority. Otherwise, the “other person” we construct becomes a distorted figure—a collection of twisted fragments shaped rooted in unfulfilled desires and projection. This shadow-figure is who M really is. The author’s invention of M is a display of what occurs when one skips the first, harder step, of self-examination and instead flees into another.
Early on in Life of M we learn that the author’s partner has been hospitalized. The comment is made in passing, but it is purposefully one of the few things we know about the author prior to her descent into M’s life. Her own grief and the difficulties of her everyday experience set up a backstory that is essential to understanding the author’s construction of M as a mode of escapism. The author is substituting much needed self-examination and reckoning with the constructing of another’s experience—M’s. Toward the end of the book, the author faces this fact head-on.
“The process had felt like a surrender to my own ugliness. It was the same ugliness in proximity to M that I had noted at the beginning, the ugliness of experience. I had dealt with that ugliness in the past by trying to pay attention to myself. But it seemed that the project had caused me to lose the ability to do that. It was this abandonment of myself that had helped me. It had enabled me to leave and go and live in someone else. Using an actor had enabled me to relinquish my experience.”
The process of coming to know M was an abandonment of the self, an attempt to flee from the ugliness of the author’s own experience. The author found it more bearable to inhabit the fictionalized life of another as opposed to reckon with their own, and in the process had truly come to know neither.
In an era of endless feeds and curated content has created an incredibly accessible and enticing abyss of escapism. Cusk’s tactful and anguished portrayal of an author displays at book-length what the algorithm does in miniature, providing the distraction of someone else’s shallow facade which one can build experience around instead of their own. But it is the harder work—of knowing your own grief, your own fear, the shapes of your passions and pleasures—that serves as the precondition for empathy and understanding the other.
Readers who come to Life of M looking for the celebrity scoop will be sorely disappointed. It would be a mistake to read the book as some scathing indictment of fame itself, a takedown of stardom’s superficiality or a wagging finger at how little we really know about the people we watch on our screens. That interpretation moves the burden away from people and towards the amorphous force of “society”: fame does this, celebrity culture has done that. But it is the author in Life of M who is purposefully skirting a burden, not the culture writ large. It is the author who willingly evades their own burdens of identity in order to immerse themselves in another, and the book is far more interested in why the author does that than in what it says about M or her milieu.
In the end, Life of M puts forth an ancient piece of advice dressed in a cutting and precise narrative: know thyself. In a culture thick with existentialism, where identity itself has been buried under aesthetic and ambushed by polarization, and where there are endless modes of escapism, reckoning with one’s selfhood can feel onerous. But in order to feel like a part of something larger than yourself, to truly understand other people as distinct individuals in a shared world, one must first have a grounded sense of self from which they can build. That is what lies at the heart of Life of M, an argument for staying put, for doing the harder work of investigating one’s self in order to truly know one another.
