Can you ever really trust a writer? Rachel Cusk, Natalie Portman and the dangerous business of becoming somebody’s material

In the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion leaves us with a warning.

'Writers are always selling somebody out.'

It is a wonderfully typical Didion sentence. It's cold, precise and just self-aware enough to make the betrayal sound almost professional.

She arrives at it after explaining that one of her advantages as a reporter was her ability to disappear into the background. People forgot that she was there observing them, listening to them, remembering what they said. More importantly, they forgot that her presence might not be in their best interests.

I always thought that was the key part of that quote, as Didion knew something that perhaps anyone who has ever befriended a writer ought to know.

Writers notice things, and we store them away. Little details here. Little details there. All stored away. We remember the strange thing you said over dinner. The way you behaved after the third glass of wine. The argument you had, and that secret that you shared. The story about your mother that you probably shouldn't have told. The peculiar way somebody's face changed when a particular name was mentioned.

We might not even be thinking about writing when it happens. But it doesn't matter years later, or perhaps much, much sooner, something resurfaces. A sentence. A gesture. A room. A marriage. And suddenly, before you know it, there it is, sitting on page 147.

Which raises an uncomfortable question. Can you ever really trust a writer?

Enter M

It's a question that has acquired some deliciously literary complications ahead of the publication of Rachel Cusk's new novel, Life of M.

The novel, due to be published on 25 August, concerns a writer who becomes fascinated by an internationally famous actress known simply as M.

So far, so fictional. Except that readers and cultural commentators have noticed something, and, to be fair, they should have, because Rachel Cusk has form here.

M sounds a lot like Natalie Portman, rather. Whoops. 

The similarities are striking enough to make coincidence feel increasingly interesting. Like Portman, M became famous as a child. She is an internationally recognised actress. She has children. She models for a major fashion brand. She is small. She reads.

And then there is the relationship between actress and writer.

Portman has been a public admirer of Cusk's work. She has recommended her books and interviewed Cusk in 2022.

Suddenly, M becomes rather more intriguing.

None of this proves that M is Natalie Portman, of course.

Neither Cusk nor Portman has confirmed that she is. Reports suggesting Portman was hurt by the portrayal have circulated, alongside other reports playing down the idea of a serious falling-out.

For now, then, Natalie Portman as M remains speculation.

But Cusk seems to know precisely how provocative that speculation is.

Early in Life of M, the narrator tells us:

“A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography.”

M's response?

“Just make it up.”

Which might be one of those sentences you later regret saying to a novelist.

When everybody knows who you mean

There is a strange alchemy that takes place when a real person enters fiction.

Names change. Circumstances shift. Events are compressed or invented. Characteristics belonging to several people might be combined into one character. A conversation that happened in a restaurant moves to a kitchen. Somebody's husband becomes somebody's brother.

Eventually the writer can reasonably say: But I made it up. And they did. Except the person being written about might reasonably reply: Yes, but you started with me. This is where things become ethically slippery.

How fictional does fiction have to become before the person who inspired it stops having a claim on the story?

Perhaps there is no satisfactory answer. Writers have always used people. It is almost impossible to imagine how they wouldn't. We write about human beings, and unfortunately our principal source of information about human beings is the inconvenient fact that we know some.

But there is surely a difference between borrowing somebody's habit of stirring their coffee seventeen times and borrowing the intimate details of their marriage.

Or is there?

Perhaps the distinction only becomes important when somebody recognises themselves. As writers, we experience enormous distance between inspiration and finished character. Writing novels is a journey. We know everything we invented. However, the subject knows everything they recognise. Those are two very different books.

Truman Capote finds out

Few writers discovered the consequences of this more spectacularly than Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood author Truman Capote. For years, Capote moved among some of the wealthiest and most socially prominent women in America. He called them his “swans”.

They invited him into their homes and their holidays. They talked to him. They confided in him. He became part of their lives. Cue Joan Didion's yet to be written warning, as there was only one small problem. He was Truman Capote.

In November 1975, Esquire published “La Côte Basque, 1965”, an extract from Capote's long-awaited novel Answered Prayers.

The story concerned the private lives, affairs, humiliations and scandals of extraordinarily wealthy New York socialites. Capote had changed things, of course, but he had not changed them enough.

The disguises were so paper-thin that people in Capote's social circle could easily recognise the originals. Among those who felt betrayed was Babe Paley, one of his closest friends. The response was devastating and career-ending. Friendships disappeared. Doors closed. Capote found himself exiled from the world that had supplied him with both companionship and material.

There is something almost breathtaking about his miscalculation. Capote seems to have believed that turning life into fiction changed the rules. It was a terrible and unforgivable mistake. His friends believed recognition was sufficient betrayal, and perhaps both positions contain an uncomfortable amount of truth.

Because what exactly had the swans thought all those years?

That one of the most celebrated writers in America was sitting at their dinner tables and not noticing anything?

Whose story is it anyway?

Capote is an extreme example, but the problem certainly didn't die with him. Karl Ove Knausgård built the six-volume My Struggle from the apparently unremarkable material of his own existence: childhood, marriage, sex, parenthood, family, embarrassment, ambition, failure and death.

The trouble with writing your own life in exhaustive detail is that other people keep appearing in it. Knausgård's relatives were not abstractions. They were identifiable human beings who had their own versions of the events he was publishing.

Years later, he acknowledged the impossible contradiction himself. Writing about his family had been cruel because they could do nothing about it. But he also felt he needed to write about his father.

There, in miniature, is the entire problem.

I shouldn't have done it.

I had to do it.

Both statements can apparently be true. Nora Ephron found a funnier solution. When her marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein collapsed after she discovered he was having an affair while she was pregnant, Ephron did what any sensible novelist would do.

She wrote a novel about it. Heartburn turned marital catastrophe into comedy. It is a brilliant read, and I always recommend it. 

There is something enormously satisfying about this, particularly because Ephron is so funny. Betray a writer, and you may discover that the problem isn't simply that they will write about you. Bernstein as a reporter must have been well aware of that.

They may get all the best lines. But Heartburn also presents another version of the same ethical difficulty. Two people experience a marriage. Two people experience its collapse.

The question becomes who owns the story afterwards? If something happens to me because of something you did, is it still your private life? Or has it become mine too?

Rachel Cusk has been here before

I said, Rachel Cusk has form here, and she does. This territory is hardly new for her.

In 2001, she published A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, her unsentimental account of pregnancy and early motherhood. The response was ferocious.

Some readers found enormous relief in Cusk's refusal to reproduce the culturally approved version of maternal bliss. Others were appalled. She was accused of coldness, selfishness and being a bad mother.

What was particularly revealing about the controversy was how quickly the discussion moved beyond the question of whether Cusk had written a good book. The argument became about whether she was allowed to say these things at all.

Cusk had taken an intimate experience surrounded by cultural expectations of privacy and sentimentality and subjected it to the writer's gaze. She looked at motherhood and reported what she saw. Not everyone thanked her for it. For me, as a man and a writer, I see no problem with Rachel Cusk writing her life as she saw it. That's just me. 

More than two decades later, Life of M arrives from a writer whose career has repeatedly worried at the boundaries between self and other, experience and narrative, observation and appropriation.

Which makes the possibility that M resembles a real actress feel less like a celebrity guessing game and more like another iteration of a question Cusk has been asking for years.

What are writers entitled to use?

The writer at your dinner table

Perhaps writers are particularly dangerous friends because friendship depends upon a version of privacy that writing continually destabilises.

Imagine telling a friend about the worst night of your marriage. You understand the transaction one way. I'm telling you this because I trust you. But what if your friend is a writer? Perhaps they understand another transaction taking place simultaneously.

Something happened while I was sitting here listening to you.

And that distinction matters, as who owns an experience shared by two people? This becomes even more complicated with fiction. A memoirist at least announces the nature of the transaction. Names may be changed, memories may be disputed, but the reader understands that reality is being claimed.

Fiction offers something slipperier. The novelist can say: It isn't you. And the subject can say: Then why does she have my childhood?

Perhaps the character isn't really Natalie Portman. Perhaps M contains fragments of Portman, other actresses, people Cusk has known, things Cusk has imagined and aspects of Cusk herself.

That is, after all, how fiction works. But imagine recognising your own life inside somebody else's invention. Would understanding the creative process make that recognition less unsettling? I'm not sure it would.

So, can you trust a writer?

Probably. Just be careful what you're trusting them to do. There is something slightly absurd about expecting writers not to use life. Where else are they supposed to get it? Every novelist is a thief of sorts.

They steal voices and rooms and awkward silences. They steal weather. They steal the strange expression on someone's face at a funeral. They steal something overheard on the bus. They steal the friend who always orders the same thing. They steal the childhood bedroom they haven't seen for thirty years.

Then they dismantle everything, mix the pieces together and insist they invented it. Mostly, we let them. Perhaps because the transformation is the point.

Life is messy, repetitive and badly paced. Fiction rearranges it. It finds patterns where none appeared to exist. It gives the devastating remark to the right person at precisely the right moment.

It makes better use of us than we generally make of ourselves. But there is still something unsettling about Didion's warning: 'Writers are always selling somebody out.'

Maybe the betrayal isn't simply using another person's life. Maybe the betrayal is allowing someone to believe you weren't taking notes. Not literal notes, necessarily. Writers are worse than that.

They remember. And yet there is one more person involved in this dubious transaction. Us. The readers. We recoil when Capote betrays his friends, then immediately want to know what he revealed. We debate whether Knausgård had the right to expose his family, while consuming thousands of pages about them.

We wonder whether Natalie Portman really inspired M precisely because the possibility makes Cusk's novel more tantalising. We demand ethical behaviour from writers while rewarding them for crossing the line. Perhaps Didion's warning, then, isn't only for the people who find themselves sitting opposite writers at dinner.

It is for readers too. Writers may always be selling somebody out. But we are the ones buying. And, more often than we might like to admit, turning the pages.

The comeback of the literary antihero

There was a time when readers expected to admire the protagonist. We wanted courage, kindness and, if not perfection, then at least someone worth cheering on. Heroes made mistakes, but they usually found redemption. Justice, more often than not, prevailed.

Modern literary fiction has taken a rather different path.

Today, some of the most memorable novels are populated by characters who are selfish, manipulative, emotionally detached or quietly destructive. They lie. They disappoint us. Sometimes they commit terrible acts. More often than not, they simply refuse to become the people we hope they will be.

Are reading goals ruining the joy of reading?

Every January, the same ritual begins.

We all do it. Me included.

As readers, we set ambitious goals. Fifty books. One hundred books. One book a week. That's obviously nothing to some people who seem to announce they've read a dozen, if not twenty, books in a month.

I have no idea how they do that, but that's probably another post.

Some readers swear by colour-coded spreadsheets. Goodreads challenges are launched. Bookstagram fills with beautifully designed trackers, while BookTok celebrates another towering pile of finished novels.

On the surface, this seems like something to celebrate. After all, encouraging people to read more can only be a good thing.

But is it really?

The best books about the Falklands War: Three essential reads and the remarkable story behind Operation Corporate

England's recent World Cup meeting with Argentina has, perhaps inevitably, prompted renewed discussion about the Falklands War. Sporting rivalries rarely exist in isolation, and while football should never be conflated with conflict, moments like these often encourage people to revisit the history that continues to shape relations between the two nations.

More than forty years after the war, the Falklands campaign remains one of the most remarkable military operations of the twentieth century. Lasting just seventy-four days between April and June 1982, it saw Britain project military power halfway around the world to retake a remote British Overseas Territory after Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982.

Why do brilliant novels so often fail at the finish?

A disappointing ending to a novel you've been enjoying has a peculiar power over us. At least it does for me. 

You can spend days immersed in a novel, recommend it to friends before you've even finished it, and carry the characters around in your head. Then you reach the final chapter and something doesn't quite land. The ending feels rushed, overly clever, relentlessly bleak, or simply at odds with everything that came before.

It raises an uncomfortable question. Can a bad ending ruin a great novel? I'm asking as I have read a slew of novels recently where this has been the experience.

At what point did making books harder to read become a sign of literary quality?

Every so often I pick up a literary novel, settle into my favourite chair, turn the first page and immediately find myself playing a game of "who's actually speaking?"

There are no quotation marks. Dialogue drifts into narration. Characters merge together. Paragraphs stretch for pages with barely a full stop to catch your breath.

It isn't long before I'm no longer immersed in the story. Instead, I'm decoding it.

Why Annie Proulx writes the American West better than almost anyone

I've written a lot about the American west and some of the epic books that it has given us from Lonesome Dove to Blood Meridian. 

Traditionally, when you mention the American West it's easy to picture the familiar mythology: cowboys riding beneath endless skies, frontier grit, freedom waiting just beyond the horizon. It is a landscape that has been romanticised for generations, transformed into a symbol as much as a place.

Then you read Annie Proulx. and the West is something altogether different. It is beautiful, but it is also unforgiving. The wind strips the land bare. Winter is not picturesque but dangerous. Distance isolates as much as it liberates. People are shaped by the country they inhabit, often in ways they barely understand themselves.

Writing the pitch before the query: What literary agents are really looking for

There is something oddly intimidating about writing a book pitch.

After months, sometimes years, of writing a novel, reducing it to a handful of paragraphs can feel almost impossible. You've lived with these characters, wandered through their world, untangled their motivations and rewritten countless scenes. Then someone asks, "So what's your book about?"

Suddenly, your carefully crafted story becomes "Well... it's complicated."

Why Dune is still the greatest science fiction novel ever written

There are books you admire. There are books you enjoy. Then there are the handful that stay with you for the rest of your life.

Frank Herbert's Dune belongs firmly in that last category for me. I've lost count of how many times I've read it, and every return journey to Arrakis reveals something I missed before. It isn't simply one of my favourite science fiction novels. It is one of my favourite novels, full stop. There, I said it.

Beautiful sentences, difficult people: Can we separate a writer’s style from their reputation?

There are writers we admire without reservation. Then there are the others.

The writers whose sentences remain brilliant while their reputations grow increasingly uncomfortable. The writers whose private behaviour, political beliefs or public remarks alter the atmosphere around their books.

A novel or essay once encountered innocently can become harder to read after we learn more about the person who wrote it. The words have not changed, but the reader has.

Down a literary rabbit hole with Christopher Caudwell, Spain and the forgotten writers of the 1930s

Sometimes you pick up a book in a second-hand bookshop. You have never heard of the writer, but you like the cover, and that is all it takes to send you down a literary rabbit hole.

This is what happened to me a couple of weeks ago when I picked up three detective novels from the 1930s by Christopher St John Sprigg.

At first, Sprigg appears to belong comfortably to the world of Golden Age crime fiction. He wrote ingenious mysteries with titles such as Fatality in Fleet Street, The Perfect Alibi and Death of an Airman.

A hundred years of murder: reading Agatha Christie while writing crime

One hundred years ago, Agatha Christie published a novel that would change crime fiction.

First released in June 1926, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was only Christie’s third Hercule Poirot novel. In 2013, members of the Crime Writers’ Association voted it the CWA Best Ever Novel, placing it above books by Raymond Chandler, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers and other giants of the genre.

That is quite a legacy for one murder in a small English village.

The return of the difficult woman in fiction

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me,” says Jane Eyre, and there is still something thrilling in the force of it. It is not merely a romantic declaration. It is a refusal to be made smaller, prettier or more convenient than the self demands. 

The difficult woman in fiction has many ancestors, and Jane is one of them. For a long time, women in fiction were allowed to be many things, provided they were legible.

Why we keep returning to campus novels

“A little learning is a dangerous thing,” wrote Alexander Pope, and campus novels have been proving him right ever since. Not because education itself is dangerous, although anyone who has sat through a three-hour seminar on structuralism may disagree, but because knowledge can become tangled with vanity, desire and the desperate wish to be exceptional.

Campus novels are rarely about education.

This is odd, given the setting. There are lectures, libraries, tutorials, essays, departmental politics and people quoting dead Europeans with the confidence of those who have not yet had to assemble flat-pack furniture. But the real subject of the campus novel is almost never the syllabus. It is a desire. Reinvention. Exclusion. Ambition. The intoxicating belief that a life can be remade by proximity to books, clever people and old buildings.

Is the literary internet making us better readers?

“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, which is a useful thing to remember in an age when reading can so easily become a performance metric. To read well is not simply to consume a book. It is to meet it, resist it, misunderstand it for a while, and perhaps find that it has been quietly rearranging the furniture in your mind.

There was once a pleasing simplicity to being a reader. You read a book. You liked it, hated it, abandoned it on page 47, pressed it upon a friend, or left it to gather dust with the quiet moral authority of something you still intended to finish.

Why the shrinking sentence might tell us more than we think

Every so often, someone announces that the novel is in decline. Usually, this is followed by a familiar roll call of suspects: phones, streaming, BookTok, schools, short attention spans, modern life, the algorithm, and the general moral decay of people who do not own enough bookmarks.

This time, though, the anxiety has a number attached.

A recent Economist piece argued that it is not only that people are reading less, but that “the texture of what is being read is changing,” noting that its analysis of hundreds of New York Times bestsellers found that sentences in popular books have become almost a third shorter since the 1930s.

When a book becomes too heavy to hold: Reading A Little Life

Some books draw us in gently. Others demand something from us. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is a novel that does both. 

It's a book, which, for me, was packed with such overbearing emotional weight, emotion so densely packed like bodies pressed together on the tube, that it is a challenging read.

The comfort of unlikeable characters and why we do not need to like who we read about

There is a particular kind of discomfort that comes from spending time with characters you do not especially like. They make poor decisions. They frustrate. They resist redemption. They say the wrong thing, choose the wrong person, protect themselves when they should reach out, or pursue what they want with a moral flexibility that makes you shift slightly in your seat.

And yet, more often than we might admit, they are the ones who linger. I can think of so many books that are true of this, and we always reach for them.

Why it is time to go deeper into the big Russian novels

If White Nights was your way into Dostoevsky, and Notes from Underground was the book that made you realise Russian fiction could feel unnervingly alive, then this is the moment to go further in, not step back. 

White Nights became a genuine social media sensation in the UK, with the Penguin edition climbing to fourth among works in translation in 2024, and recent commentary has also noted a BookTok-era rise in interest around Notes from Underground. That feels like the perfect doorway into the larger Russian novels, the books where the scale grows, the stakes deepen, and the tradition fully opens out.

The return of the reader as tastemaker

For years, literary taste was often imagined as something that travelled downwards. Review sections, prize lists, critics, established media, and publishing gatekeepers shaped the conversation, and readers received it. That version was never entirely true, but it held enough power to feel convincing.

Now the flow looks messier, faster, and far more interesting.

Readers are not just participating in book culture. They are actively shaping it. In many cases, they are driving it.