This thinly veiled fiction is a hit job on actress Natalie Portman. That’s the point

Works of fiction often come with a legal boilerplate disclaimer inside the front cover: “any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental”.

Not so the latest novel by Rachel Cusk , the Anglo-American author who reinvented autofiction with her “Outline” trilogy, in which she does away with character and plot.

The Life of M barnstormed through literary gossip circles, well ahead of its US release on August 25.

It will be published in Australia on September 1, and I was lucky enough to receive an advance copy.

I devoured it, and not just for celebrity gossip reasons – although it is rare when lovers of literary fiction get to enjoy some lowbrow along with our highbrow.

The Life of M is many things, but it is definitely based on Portman, although the entire point of the book is that the narrator is projecting stories onto her celebrity subject, none of which are true.

In the opening scene of Cusk’s novel, the unnamed, cipher-like narrator tells us that “a little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography”.

Already we are confused – how can you write someone else’s autobiography?

For Cusk, that is precisely the point. All the stories we invent about other people are actually about ourselves.

Next, the actress M asks the narrator: “Would you just make it up?” The enigmatic narrator doesn’t respond. Instead, she starts to tell her story.

The set-up is clear, but notwithstanding the postmodern trickery, the baseline facts of the character’s life are not at all made up. They are stolen from reality.

And not in a subtle way – the Life of M is not some roman à clef that can only be deciphered by those in the know.

The whole point is that celebrity culture means we know a lot about these people. They belong to the public imagination, and don’t enjoy the privacy that we normies do. So anyone with cursory knowledge of Portman’s resume can work it out.

Cusk exploits this vulnerability in a way that is either clever or cruel, but what she is doing, I believe, is showing us all how we are similarly cruel, or at least, complicit, we are when it comes to public ownership of celebrities.