Mandy Moore is writing her own narrative and no one here is going to stop her.
The This Is Us star opened up to Glamour about her career, love life and family and how she's come to terms with some of the choppier bits of her past. "I'm a woman now. I've been married and divorced. I've had ups and downs, professionally and personally," she told Glamour.
Now, Moore is at what many consider to be a high point in her career. She's already had hit pop songs and appeared in plenty of films and TV shows since her teenage days, including A Walk to Remember, Princess Diaries, Tangled and I'm Not Here. Getting to where she is today, however, involved some roadblocks along the way.
In 2015, Moore and her husband Ryan Adams filed for divorce after nearly six years of marriage. Both of their reps at the time called their parting "respectful, amicable," but Moore is now talking about it in a more candid manner. "I didn't choose the right person," she told the magazine.
Not long before her marriage to Adams, she was dealing with family upheavals of her own. Her mother left Moore's dad for another woman, and she found out accidentally via an email draft. "I couldn't control what happened to my immediate family, but I could control starting my own," she explained. "Not the smartest decision."
The Rebecca Pearson actress revealed that she felt "spiritually and fundamentally stuck" in her relationship and doesn't "feel guilty" about her divorce. "I don't fault myself for it," she said.
The end of that marriage was a new beginning for Moore. "When people said, 'I'm sorry,' I was like, 'No. Sorry would have been had I stayed in a very unhealthy situation.' I didn't. I found my way out. And when I did, things opened back up again," she explained.
This Is Us hit the airwaves and viewers' emotions by storm not long after. The show has allowed Moore to not feel so pigeon-holed anymore after she felt like she was being typecast as "America's Sweetheart" and solely a rom-com star. She believes that reputation "prevented me from finding momentum, workwise, because people saw me in one light."
"This Is Us has allowed me to show people that I'm not perpetually stuck in the realm of teen romantic comedies," she said. "After years of not being able to find things that I felt challenged by, it's really cool to potentially be in a position to find material and help create it."
Now, her trajectory has skyrocketed. She's on the up and up. In 2015, she met her now-fiancé Taylor Goldsmith because of an Instagram she posted about his band, Dawes. He slid into her DMs, and the rest is history. They got engaged in 2017 after two years of dating, and Moore gushed to Glamour about how much of a support system Goldsmith was around the time of her divorce. "I was still dealing with the trauma of my divorce when we started dating," she explained. "Taylor was steadfast in his support."
She couldn't speak highly enough of how much she really loves him. "He makes me melt. I can imagine no better partner. He's going to be the most tremendous father," she said.
In the end, she's grateful for all that she has gone through in order to get her to the exact spot she's in today. She told Glamour, "I view the past as a stepping-stone to get me where I am today. I would gladly weather all of that a million times over if it brought me to Taylor again."
Don't only count on seeing Mandy Moore on your television screens on Tuesday nights. She could be heading to your music library soon, too. "I feel ready now," she said about making music again.
She sings in her 2007 song "Most of Me": "I won't hold anything back / I won't hold anything in" and those words still ring true. "You give less of a s--t about how the world perceives you," she said. "Now it's more important to me to be self-satisfying."
The November issue of Glamour arrives on newsstands October 10.