Prince Harry isn’t the only one holding nothing back, as Maria Shriver is also laying it all on the table in her new book, I Am Maria: My Reflections and Poems on Heartbreak, Healing, and Finding Your Way Home, which is due to be published on April 1st, 2025.
In the book, Shriver opens up about some of the most difficult moments in her life, including her 2021 divorce from Arnold Schwarzenegger, revealing how “terrified” she felt in its aftermath.
Maria Shriver Calls Arnold Schwarzenegger Divorce A 'Devastating, Life-Altering Blow'
In excerpts of the book obtained by various publications, Shriver, 69, hasn't appeared to shy away from discussing the end of her 25-year marriage to the 77-year-old Terminator star, with whom she shares four children: Katherine, 35, Christina, 33, Patrick, 31, and Christopher, 27.
Their marriage was plagued with allegations of repeated affairs. Shriver filed for divorce back in 2011, shortly after the actor and bodybuilder admitted to fathering a child, Joseph Baena, with their household staffer Mildred "Patty" Baena – a revelation that shook their marriage to its core. However, the divorce wasn't officially finalized until 2021.
The New York Times best-selling author described the experience as a "devastating, life-altering blow," which was made even more painful by the deaths of her parents, Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Sargent Shriver, around the same time.
"My twenty-five-year-long marriage blew up," Shriver wrote. "It broke my heart, it broke my spirit, it broke what was left of me. Without my marriage, my parents, a job – the dam of my lifelong capital-D Denial just blew apart."
"I was consumed with grief and wracked with confusion, anger, fear, sadness, and anxiety," she continued, adding: "I was unsure now of who I was, where I belonged. Honestly, it was brutal, and I was terrified."
Maria Shriver Opens Up About How Poetry Helped Heal Her
Shriver is seemingly in a much better place now – and she credits much of her healing to writing poetry! She described undergoing a "litany" of self-discovery methods, including therapy, spiritual healing, shamans, psychics, and even time spent in a convent (yes, really!) but in the end, it was poetry that helped her find peace!
"I started writing from a deep place within. Through my poetry, I've found a woman who was terrified of not being able to live up to her family's legacy – scared of not being big enough, a good-enough daughter, sister, wife, mother, journalist," she wrote, before going on to reflect on her tendency to hold herself to "impossible" standards.
"I found a woman who had insisted on measuring herself by some impossible standard that guaranteed she'd come up short and feel bad about herself no matter what," Shriver said, before adding: "I found someone who had spent a lifetime avoiding grief. And I also learned that when that lifetime of dissociated grief and trauma is released, it rushes out like a tsunami."
