Eight years ago, the international bestselling author was diagnosed with a debilitating pain condition. Now able to walk again, she talks about women, medicine and pushing into the unknown
Author and disability advocate Tara Rae Moss, who is in remission from complex regional pain syndrome, is speaking at Our Bodies, a panel at the Sydney Opera House’s All About Women festival on 10 March. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian
“I was stuck in the biological mode of thinking around my illness and pain,” she says. “So many doctors in different countries and continents told me that I would never recover. I was split down the middle like a ruler and half of my body was on fire, cold fire.” To research her novels, Moss once trained as a private eye and acquired her racing car licence – a level of physical immersion in her characters that was no longer possible. How did CRPS change her writing? “It changed everything, on all levels of my being,” she says, frankly., now goes by Rae or Tara Rae. The reclamation of the name she was born with reflects a newfound acceptance of herself as she is while honouring all the ways she is no longer the same person.
“The idea that women don’t have authority is many centuries old,” says Moss, who famously grappled with female archetypes in her bestselling work of nonfiction The Fictional Woman. To dodge the joggers, she suggests we sit on the grass. CRPS, she says, is more common in women. Diagnosis itself is a privilege. “We know that women are less likely to have pain taken seriously,” she says. She talks about the, the 1911 study that transformed medical training and established the primacy of the biomedical model of medicine. It undermined, at least in the west, healing traditions based on the connection between the mind and body and world around us.