Amy Wallace finds some life peace

Journalist Amy Wallace, editor-at-large at Los Angeles magazine these days, has a self-exploration piece in More magazine about how she came to trust in the cosmos that life was going to turn out OK. She touches on whether she believes in God, her upbringing by self-proclaimed Northern California radicals, and also her divorce from Jim Newton, the Los Angeles Times editor-at-large. Excerpt:

Watching my marriage end was like falling on my head.

What to say about the things that drove us apart? Lack of communication, professional competition and the refusal to get help were only some of the factors. I’m not the first, I know, to subconsciously seek to address the problems of my childhood in my marriage. Looking back, I see how I strived to create a relationship for which I had no real model. That my divorce came right after the birth of our son, Jack—the most important thing either of us will ever have a part in—was especially crushing. After a lifetime built on an unspoken but fierce vow that I would never repeat the cycle of a child torn between two divorced parents, I was doing just that.

My devastation wasn’t pretty. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t listen to music. I set out to cut off all my hair but then, after a friend gently counseled restraint, decided to color it platinum blond instead.

Wallace has an email exchange with Viggo Mortensen, "on the subjects of hope, endurance, and human nature," in the current issue of Los Angeles.

Photo from amy-wallace.com