‘I don’t feel like ‘Tara’ in the same way’: Tara Rae Moss on motherhood, divorce and why she changed her name

After battling a debilitating pain disorder, Tara Rae Moss is writing a new chapter – as she provides an update on the real reason she changed her name.

Picture: Simon Upton for Stellar

Among the provocative words emblazoned across Tara Rae Moss’ face on the striking cover of The Fictional Woman – the model and best-selling author’s 2014 nonfiction sensation – were the jumble of labels affixed to her throughout her life: Dumb Blonde, Feminist, Bleeding Heart, Gold-Digger, B*tch.

A decade on, Moss can add a few more: Survivor, Healer, Single Mother. She may abhor the “pretty neat boxes we like to put women in”, but she’ll happily own all of them, especially when they’re hard-won.

And these more recent labels have certainly been just that.

Since the release of The Fictional Woman 10 years ago, “rather a lot has happened”, the Canadian Australian tells Stellar, starting with the changes in her career, marital status and even her name after she emerged from the chrysalis of a self-described metamorphosis brought on by an eight-year battle with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), a diagnosis that itself followed a hip injury.

Tara Rae Moss has opened up about her next chapter. Picture: Simon Upton for Stellar

The chronic and debilitating condition left her bedridden at her worst, using a wheelchair at times, or walking with a cane (which she fondly called Wolfie). “Your body is in fight or flight and you feel like you’re being burned alive,” Moss explains of the seemingly endless cycle of acute physical agony from which she feared she would never recover.

“Your body doesn’t know you’re not being burned alive. You’re actually having that experience in a real sense. You’re not healing because your body’s busy trying to give you energy to get out of your life-threatening situation.”

Moss says she followed conventional medical routines at first, attending several pain-management programs, going through multiple hospital visits and receiving 24/7 ketamine infusions. But she made little progress. It was only three years ago, when she was offered a virtual-reality (VR) trial at a pain clinic in Victoria, the capital of British Columbia in Canada, that things began to turn a corner.

“I could feel my body start to calm and my pain was relieved a little bit,” she recalls.

“I started doing VR meditation, then I switched to guided meditation. Now I can just meditate and it’s part of my life. It’s really helpful for my nervous system but also my overall wellbeing and my spiritual connection.”

‘I reject the idea.’ Tara Rae Moss doesn’t view the end of her 15 year marriage as a failure. Picture: Simon Upton for Stellar

Picture: Simon Upton for Stellar

A successful author of 12 mystery and crime novels – she’s currently working on her 13th – Moss has also been a model, a prominent feminist, a vintage clothing aficionado (sewing her own corsets and traversing Australia in a 1950s caravan called Bettie) and, more recently, a disability advocate. “I’m a method learner,” she says with a laugh.

Coinciding with turning 50 last year, she’s also very much in her holistic era, working as a reiki and shamanic healing practitioner, a seiðkona (a kind of modern-day Norse witch) and rune reader, and a sign for her business hangs outside her quaint 1940s cottage in her hometown on Vancouver Island, Canada, her primary home since 2021.

Listen to the full interview with Liane Moriarty on the latest episode of Stellar’s podcast, Something To Talk About:

Then there’s her day job: life celebrant. “I’m the woman who pulls into the clergy car park when there’s a funeral,” Moss says.

“I’m at the front with the service book, I’m writing words of remembrance for bereaved families and working with people in that grief context. I’m also training as a death doula, working with people during their transition between life and death.”

Having felt at death’s door multiple times herself, Moss says she was declared to be in remission in September 2023 after nine weeks of treatment at the Spero Clinic, walking out of the renowned US centre for CRPS studies unassisted for the first time in years. While she says it’s impossible

to attribute her recovery to one thing alone, she advocates a multidisciplinary approach to healing, including the complementary therapies that helped her.

However she arrived here at her current state, Moss says it has changed her on a fundamental level. Which is why she goes by Tara Rae or just Rae in her-day-to-day life now – the names given to her by her beloved mother, who died in 1990 when Moss was just 16.

Lights, camera: Tara Rae Moss. Picture: News Corp Australia

Addressing the National Press Club in Canberra. Picture: Kym Smith

“I don’t feel like ‘Tara’ in the same way, and I’m embracing it rather than denying it,” she explains.

“She’s great! It’s not like I went, ‘Gee, I don’t want to be her anymore’, but I don’t feel like that previous person. So I decided to reclaim all the parts of myself that I was born with. It’s part of a reclaiming of my whole self.”

The other badge Moss now wears with honour is that of single mother. She is proud of the way she and her ex-husband, poet and photographer Berndt Sellheim, have navigated the end of their long marriage, and are now in what she calls a “beautiful co-parenting relationship” with their 13-year-old daughter, Sapphira.

“I reject the idea that a 15-year relationship, with all of that wonder and beauty, is a failure,” she says.

“Sometimes it’s healthiest for certain bonds to be released. I don’t think relationships, certainly not of this type, end. They’re just changing form. It’s not the thing you plan, but it is sometimes the thing you have to adapt to. People are like, ‘Is it scary being a single mum at 50?’ And it’s not. I’m more myself than ever, and I have much to be grateful for.”

One constant through this intense change is the author’s tie to Australia, the country in which she lived for 25 years. She returns regularly, not just to promote her books but to run healing workshops, passing on the teachings that have changed her life.

She insists this is what she was called to do, the next stage in her evolution.

“There’s a saying: ‘To learn, you must suffer’,” Moss says. “When you’re going through something really difficult, it’s good to look for the light, to look for the gift, to keep holding onto the possibility that there’s something in this that is going to make me more than what I was before. And to keep that narrative of hope. Because without hope, we can’t get better.”

See the full shoot with Tara Rae Moss inside the latest issue of Stellar. For more from Stellar and Something To Talk About, click here.

Originally published as ‘I don’t feel like ‘Tara’ in the same way’: Tara Rae Moss on motherhood, divorce and why she changed her name