BOLDLY, Rachel Cusk’s new novel Life of M is doing that thing where fiction wears a real person’s coat and dares you to notice.

The book centres on a mega-famous actor known only as “M”, and it doesn’t take long for readers to start joining the dots. Early on, M’s breakout film is described as one that “immediately brought her childhood to an end” — a detail that lines up neatly with Natalie Portman being cast in Léon: The Professional at 11. Later, there’s also a film about “obsessive, wild ballerinas”, which will sound very familiar to anyone who remembers Black Swan.

Inside the novel, M attends a bookstore event after hours alongside “a writer of some renown” and a fashion model with “some vague self-absorption”. It’s brand-sponsored, and the scene has proved slippery enough that even hardened pop-culture detectives have been hunting for a real-world equivalent — from fashion’s bookish influencer moments to luxury labels’ literary-flavoured stunts.

As the Portman comparisons spread, so has a rumour that she’s unhappy with how she’s portrayed — though that reaction isn’t something you can simply lift from the book without interpretation, particularly depending on how you read the final lines.

Cusk’s novel now sits in a long, gleefully nosy tradition of “biogossip”: books that thrive on the delicious tension between what’s “just fiction” and what readers suspect is lifted straight from life. The genre stretches from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando causing high-society chatter, to The Devil Wears Prada being widely linked to Anna Wintour, to more recent works that invite a voyeuristic guess at the real people behind the characters.

But Cusk’s approach is deliberately withholding: rather than showering readers with recognisable status symbols and name-brand breadcrumbs, she strips away the easy identifiers — and turns the focus back on us, and what we think we’re entitled to know about famous women.