Life of M
Rachel Cusk
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From the publisher
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.