After our wonderfully lazy brunch, we headed further into the shop for an equally wonderful browse. (Note to booksellers out there: if you have the room, lean hard into the tables-with-stacks-of-books option where your customers can be enthralled by the many and varied book covers, as opposed to endless shelves of gives-you-a-crick-in-the neck spines. And if you don't have the room . . . make room.)
Mid-browse, after having wandered slowly through several cozy nooks in the store, my eye fell on the Rachel Cusk shelf. And--what was this? Life of M? I hadn't heard of this one. I snatched it up and quickly flipped to the copyright page. Published in 2026? How can this possibly have happened? (“This” being the fact that one of my favorite authors has published a book about which I was completely unaware.) It felt like both an unexpected treat and an egregious oversight.
Let’s fast-forward past the conversation where Sam tried to remind me that he had mentioned this book to me previously, so I wasn’t actually unaware of the book—I’d just forgotten about it. (On brand.) Anyway, when he told me the premise of the book (it's a quasi-biography of a famous actress who is only identified by the letter M, although rumor has it that the actress is Natalie Portman), I said, "That's weird." (That's what you said last time we talked about it, Sam replied.) It seemed like quite a departure from Cusk's other books. But that didn't stop me from buying it.
This is a short book, and very easy to gobble down (especially with feet up, on vacation time), but there was something that annoyed me as I read. Similar to how the letter M stands in for the name of the actress, Cusk engages in what I guess I might call very vague name-dropping--really more hints than anything else. I found myself trying to work out the little riddles and mysteries. And then it was like the last line said ha HA, gotcha! Nothing is as it seems!
Ultimately, not my favorite Cusk book, but I still enjoyed the reading experience.
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