Life of M

The novel alternates between three narrative perspectives: a first-person narrator writing the autobiography of a famous film actor known only as M, a third-person account of M's inner life, and an unnamed first-person plural voice ("we") reflecting on creative life in an unnamed city. Each chapter is separated by a full page of the repeated mathematical formula ∴ m = 3/11, a visual motif that frames the value of "m," and by extension, of M herself.

The narrator, a writer, tells M about the autobiography project. M, a famous film actor and model for a major brand whose image appears on advertisements across the city, asks whether the narrator will simply make it up. The two met in a bookstore. In person, M is very small and lives in a large house on the other side of the river, which the narrator likens to a doll's house with M as the doll inside. The narrator notes that both secretly believe their power derives from the ways they have been damaged.

The narrator reads a book by a woman sexually abused by her stepfather throughout childhood and draws parallels with M's story. M starred in a film as a child, and the role immediately ended her childhood. The original script included scenes implying the child character invited sexual interaction with an adult male character, but M's mother objected and the scenes were cut. After the film came out, other children bullied M. She responded by deciding to be smart and work hard, recognizing that reality could be engineered. For both M and the abuse survivor, the premature end of childhood placed them outside of time.

The narrator's partner falls seriously ill and is hospitalized. Each day the narrator walks to the hospital, passing an old cinema. One evening the narrator watches a film about a boy whose honesty enrages authority until he is sent to a remedial institution; the boy runs away, reaches the sea, and turns back. For the narrator, the film captures the end of childhood and the way cinema temporarily breaks the power of time.

The partner's operation succeeds; the illness should have been fatal, and the doctors' intervention came just in time. After the partner's release, the narrator and M meet for lunch. At the next table, a woman pretends to photograph her dessert while actually photographing M; M confronts her. Outside afterward, the narrator recognizes an inability to be authentic around M: Everything the narrator does in M's company feels false, as though the narrator is acting while M alone is real. The narrator watches M's taxi drive away and does not see M again for a long time.

The "we" narrators describe living in a beautiful city where they do not belong but have chosen to live. They walk dogs, take children to school, and work on creative projects they call "recordings," which function as memory and history. Their parents and native land are dead or far away. They have the leisure to create themselves but find self-creation difficult. They recall dressing their small children, pulling garments over their heads, and feel there is no one they could trust the same way.

M travels to a foreign city, moving through curated spaces. In a luxury hotel she reads Marcus Aurelius, who argues that even the most famous person will be forgotten. She meets a depressed friend who wonders whether her unmedicated sadness might be an authentic form of witness; the notion that a person could be dominated by an internal idea is alien to M. M visits a museum that was once the archive of a man of tremendous wealth, whose mistress she is to play in a film. The curator reveals the office was transported from elsewhere and reconstructed; the family never lived in this building.

M's career-defining role is in a film about a young girl chosen to star in a ballet. The ballet director taps certain ballerinas on the shoulder, letting them believe they have been selected, then announces they are dismissed; those left untouched have been chosen. This cruelty shakes the barrier M maintains between herself and her roles, and the performance becomes the description of a private agony she has never identified. Being made to feel not good enough proves violently stimulating: The poison of criticism awakens not jealousy but a steely spirit of competition. The transformation of cruelty into possession brings M a new kind of glory.

M endures a painful meeting in a gloomy brasserie with an unnamed figure from her personal life who treats her existence as an affront and exercises critical control over her. Her broader family relationships are equally fraught: Relatives feel ordinary claims on her, grow upset over publicity, and threaten her with exile from blood ties. Increasingly, M surrenders to the weightlessness of friendship, where there is no memory and therefore no judgment.

The "we" narrators return throughout, describing routines: queuing for bread, visiting a photography exhibition of self-portraits by a young woman who died by suicide, walking through forests. They visit healers and therapists, searching for acceptance. They reflect on their work as a white field of concentration into which they levitate. When their children were born, the children posed the greatest threat to that concentration, and learning this was not the case for men diminished men forever in their eyes.

M holidays at a renovated farmhouse on an island, once an artists' colony. On the terrace she hears a choking sound: the housekeeper's elderly husband drowning in his own lungs. Back in the city, M talks to a nanny at her children's school gates, a young woman from Eastern Europe raised by her grandparents because her mother left the country to earn money. M probes with questions, making the girl her responsibility without intending to fulfill it. At a rooftop spa, cold water is poured over M's head during a treatment, and she understands that if this were real torture, she would not survive it.

A fashion brand stages a "literary salon" in a bookstore, inviting M for her well-known taste in literature. A false discussion is filmed for the brand's media team, producing images of lively engagement; in the real event, participants falter and the audience sits in bewilderment clutching gift bags. At a dinner party afterward, a giant pie is brought from the oven. When the knife comes down, M feels a chasm of loneliness and terror. She passes the plates but does not keep one for herself.

M attends a theatre workshop led by a director friend. Actors sit barefoot in a circle, lighting matches and speaking their "secret" for as long as the match burns. M says her secret is that she has no secret and blows out the match. She later meets a respected journalist at a hidden restaurant who asks whether M blames her parents for letting her act as a child. She insists she wanted to act; he gently tells her it was abuse. M feels the impossibility of anyone understanding what she is. Passing a small cinema, M sees one of her own films and impulsively buys a ticket. Watching herself play a woman devastated by fame, she is shocked by what she sees. Leaving, she feels a thrill of self-congratulation remembering that she was acting.

In the final chapter, the narrator shows M some of the writing. M does not like it: The portrayal makes her seem to lack humanity and to be unable to love. The narrator protests that the character is invented and that the narrator knows nothing about M's private life, having only watched her films. The narrator confesses that the near-death of their partner made them frightened of living, and that inhabiting the M they created helped. M says she has never been to the places described or done the things narrated, and she is not the atomized victim the narrator portrays. She stares at the narrator with what the narrator describes as mechanical power that seems to erase what it looks on, and tells the narrator they can do what they want but cannot use her name. As the narrator leaves, M calls out from the doorway with her dogs beside her, smiles warmly, and asks whether the narrator is "a guy or a girl." The novel ends without an answer.