Life of M

From the critically-acclaimed author of the Outline trilogy, an irresistible novel of fame, power, beauty and truth — and a blazing renovation of the form

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.

M is a film star, and one of the most recognisable faces of our time.

With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. For her, it seems, the rules of reality have melted away.

Now M has agreed to let a stranger write her biography. Their project will sprawl and expand: to the olive groves and holiday beaches where M spends her days; across hotel rooms, bourgeois facades, film sets; through endless modern cities. It is hard not to feel ugly next to M, hard not to feel insignificant. But what truths – about the very experience of living – might this proximity allow the writer to briefly capture? And what in the end will M make of their work?

In Life of M, Rachel Cusk has again fashioned a new kind of literature. A novel stripped of artifice, it takes our emptiness and fills it with grace.