Maria Shriver, award-winning journalist and former First Lady of California, has opened up about the collapse of her marriage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. She shares her experience in her new book of poetry, I Am Maria. An excerpt was recently released ahead of the book, which is scheduled to come out in April. It revealed Shriver’s deeply personal reflections on grief, identity, and healing.
Here’s what we know so far about what Shriver shared.
Maria Shriver details Arnold Schwarzenegger divorce in new book
Maria Shriver recounts the collapse of her 25-year marriage to Arnold Schwarzenegger in I Am Maria, stating, “It broke my heart, it broke my spirit, it broke what was left of me.” (via PEOPLE)
She writes, “Without my marriage, my parents, a job — the dam of my lifelong capital-D Denial just blew apart.” In 2011, Schwarzenegger admitted during counseling to fathering a child in 1997 with housekeeper Mildred Baena. Shriver then filed for divorce that July. It was finalized in December 2021.
Shriver adds, “Honestly, it was brutal, and I was terrified.” She recounts sitting alone in a dark hotel room, crying and thinking to herself: “Maria, this doesn’t have to be the end of you.” Shriver credits her children — Katherine, Christina, Patrick, and Christopher — for showing “grace, valor, and courage” during the upheaval. She states, “Everything about their world and the sanctity of their home got uprooted in an instant.”
In the book, Shriver reflects on her upbringing in a “competitive Irish Catholic family” where “you didn’t sit around and talk about your feelings.” She shares, “The message was burned into my little brain: Maria isn’t enough.” She reveals that a “lifetime of dissociated grief and trauma… rushes out like a tsunami” when finally confronted.
Shriver once visited a cloistered convent, where Mother Dolores told her, “I think what you’re really looking for, my child, is permission to leave your marriage, to be Maria.” Shriver says she began writing poetry “from a deep place within,” discovering parts of herself long buried. She writes, “I’ve made lots of mistakes. One of them was tying my self-worth to my achievements.”