India, Oct. 20 -- Rachel Cusk, the British writer best known for her autofictional novels and unsparing books on motherhood, divorce and female identity, opens her latest novel, Life of M with a wonderful little trap. An unnamed writer, clearly a Cusk-like figure, tells M, a famous actor, that she wants to write her autobiography. M seems game. "Would you just make it up?" she asks. It is a funny line, but also a dangerous one. It gives the writer permission to invent, distort, enter and occupy. That permission, and the cost of using it, becomes the real story of this slim, brilliant and morally uneasy novel.

There has been a great deal of literary chatter around the 147-page work, partly because of the air of scandal around it and partl...