Three or four years ago, bestselling author Tara Rae Moss started officiating funerals. Now, wherever she’s living—at the moment, it’s a friend’s house in Australia—Moss contacts local funeral homes and offers her services as a “life celebrant,” shaping anecdotes from the deceaseds’ loved ones into well-rounded narratives fit for public consumption. She estimates she’s worked about 100 services to date, including one for her beloved aunt. “Grappling with grief and death just feels like something I’m here to explore,” Moss says via Zoom. “It’s a space that I can be comfortable in.”
Unusual words, perhaps, for a woman who first stepped into the public eye as a fashion model. But since then, Moss, who just turned 52, has been a self-professed liver of many lives.
Draped in green velvet and peeking out from wide, angular glasses, Moss is in the thick of her latest book tour. To prove it, she’s seated in front of a glistening hardcover copy of The Italian Secret, the third installment of her historical mystery series featuring 1940s Australian PI Billie Walker. The novel, which recently published overseas and is being released by Dutton in the U.S. in December, is Moss’s 15th book; she’s also penned a grisly procedural series, a four-part fantasy saga, and two works of nonfiction.
The Italian Secret picks up shortly after the conclusion of The Ghosts of Paris, with business booming at the PI firm Billie reopened after the death of her father. Her latest client is Darlene Elliott, an abused wife seeking proof of her husband’s infidelity so she can legally secure a divorce. While finishing up that case with the help of her hunky assistant, Billie discovers a photograph, a packet of letters, and a significant sum of money squirreled away in one of her father’s old filing cabinets. The artifacts suggest that the late Barry Walker may have secretly fathered a child with a woman in Naples, prompting Billie to recruit her mother for a luxury cruise to Italy, where she hopes to get to the bottom of it. Meanwhile, the Darlene Elliott case takes a violent turn, and romantic sparks develop between Billie and Sydney police detective Hank Cooper.
All the while, champagne flows and Billie takes time to slip on glamorous dresses. For Moss, it’s all part of the series’s ethos. “I wanted to make sure that readers—and in particular, women readers—can get in the passenger seat with Billie Walker, and she can take them into these dark places, and they’re going to end up okay on the other end,” she says. Some combination of murder, human trafficking, and fascism factor into each installment, but she stresses that she “wanted to approach this difficult material in a way that could leave people feeling stronger by the end of the book, rather than feeling like, God, what people do to each other is so awful.”
Moss is not exactly sure where the instinct comes from, but she has a general idea. Her maternal grandparents were Dutch refugees who narrowly escaped the Nazis in the 1940s. Their story could support a historical novel of its own: German troops abducted Moss’s grandfather, a baker, from the family home in Numansdorp and shipped him to a munitions-manufacturing labor camp in Berlin. Distraught, Moss’s grandmother cycled across Holland and Germany to visit him, smuggling flour and sugar in the hollows of her bike. She managed to pass the ingredients to Moss’s grandfather, who used them to bake bread in the camp’s munitions oven, next to the bombs. He used the loaf to bribe the camp’s foreman, who granted Moss’s grandfather a day off work. He promptly fled the country on foot. Soon after, he and Moss’s grandmother immigrated to western Canada, where Moss was born in 1973.
“Ordinary people did extraordinary things during this time,” Moss says of the years during and after WWII. “That’s what I like to center in the Billie Walker series. It’s not about the generals and world leaders; it’s not about Churchill. It’s about regular folks and what they do to survive and adapt in these unusual, changing, often-horrifying circumstances.”
If the story of her grandparents didn’t exactly haunt the author’s childhood, it did influence her concept of and interest in human rights. Growing up in Victoria, Moss and her sister regularly trick-or-treated for UNICEF, and her parents—Moss’s mother was an amateur painter and sculptor, and her father sold fridges at Eaton’s, a now-defunct Canadian department store—were heavily involved in charity. Moss says that as a child, “it just felt like part of being alive that you would help the community, or communities overseas that were going through things that your grandparents went through. You can’t survive this world as an island, as a solo individual, pretty much without exception.”
Moss’s instinct for advocacy has manifested most prominently in a position as a UNICEF ambassador that she’s held since 2013. More recently, though, she’s been focused on disability rights, in part for personal reasons. After sustaining a hip injury in 2016, she developed a rare, debilitating condition called complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), for which she used a wheelchair for several years. (“It made it very hard to write, but it also made writing even more important to me, because I could disappear into it,” she says.) Before entering remission two years ago, Moss spoke in front of the Australian parliament urging members to take action to help those suffering from chronic pain, and gave a slate of interviews to outlets like the Guardian and Marie Claire illuminating her condition.
“It feels pretty extraordinary to not have the brain fog, to not be on medication, and to be able to go hiking between book events,” Moss says of her remission. “It’s like a new lease on life.”
One could be forgiven, at this point in Moss’s biography, for needing to take a breath. And all this before discussing the modeling career that put her on the map. In brief: Moss was recruited for local gigs as a teenager due to her self-described “Amazonian features.” She got serious about it after her mother died of multiple myeloma in 1990, embarking on what she humbly calls a “mixed bag” of a career, shooting beauty editorials, Cosmo spreads, splashy ads, and the like while traveling the world. All along, though, she harbored writerly ambitions, which she began to satisfy at 24 when she won Australia’s Scarlet Stiletto Awards short story competition. An agent reached out to her directly, and that led to the publication of Fetish, her 1999 debut.
Moss acknowledges that she’s a bit of a chameleon, but she’s learned to stop pathologizing it. Seeking out new challenges is “part of who I am and what drives me, so I don’t have to force it,” she says. “Other people might find it disorienting or confusing, because they’ll be like, No, she doesn’t do that; she does this. But, rightly or wrongly, those boxes just don’t exist in me.”
It’s a quality she’s drawing on now, in a moment of personal transition. After divorcing the poet and novelist Berndt Sellheim a few years ago, Moss is preparing to sell her house in Canada and adjusting to life as a single mother. She’s not exactly sure what’s next. “I’m feeling interested in being mobile,” she says. “Now that I’m mobile, I’m really mobile,” she adds, alluding to her freedom from CRPS.
She’s taking at least a few cues from her 14-year-old. “She’s old enough now to kind of know where she wants to be, what she wants to do,” Moss says. Well, like mother like daughter.
