Maria Shriver has a new book of poetry and personal essays coming out next Tuesday, and People has the exclusive excerpt—including her thoughts on the demise of her marriage to former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. "It broke my heart, it broke my spirit, it broke what was left of me," she writes in I Am Maria of the affair her husband had that ended their quarter-century-long marriage, right on the tail of losing both her parents and her job as first lady of California. "I was consumed with grief and wracked with confusion, anger, fear, sadness, and anxiety. I was unsure now of who I was, where I belonged. Honestly, it was brutal, and I was terrified." Us Weekly notes their divorce was finalized in 2021, a decade after proceedings began. More:
- Out of the darkness: "As I sat on my hotel room floor in the dark, alone with tears streaming down my face, I thought to myself: Maria, this doesn't have to be the end of you," Shriver writes of the affair's aftermath. She adds that she talked to a nun about her predicament, who told her, "I think what you're really looking for, my child, is permission to leave your marriage, to be Maria."
- On growing up as a lesser-known Kennedy: "The message was burned into my little brain: Maria isn't enough," Shriver, the daughter of Sargent Shriver and JFK sister Eunice Kennedy, writes of often being mistaken for JFK's daughter, Caroline Kennedy, while growing up. "Fighting that message became my lifetime motivation."
- On the deaths of uncles JFK and Bobby Kennedy: "No one stopped to cry, no one stopped to grieve. I could feel that these events rocked the world and ruptured my entire family's life, especially my mother's—but she never spoke about them to me or anyone else." Shriver says that attitude impacted her own stoic nature later in life: "I learned how to cope with trauma, loss, sadness, and grief by doing what everyone in my family seemed to do: annihilate the feelings by pretending they didn't exist."
- On meeting Arnold: Shriver says when she met her future husband, then 30, he "looked and sounded different from anyone I'd ever met. My attraction to him was instantaneous." She also details her family's reaction to him, calling them "shocked." "No one understood my relationship with Arnold," she writes. "After all, Arnold was a Republican, a bodybuilder, and he wanted to be a movie star. He lived in a two-bedroom apartment and wore a Speedo."
Despite the upheaval in her family, Shriver, her ex, and their kids have held things together: An
E! News report on
White Lotus star Patrick Schwarzenegger, Shriver and Schwarzenegger's eldest son, notes that the younger Schwarzenegger's TV family is "chaotic and messy AF ... thankfully that's not the case in reality." More from Shriver
here. (More
Maria Shriver stories.)
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