Maria Shriver understandably needed some time to process what happened between her and ex-husband Arnold Schwarzenegger.
She even got herself to a nunnery at one point, like “a scene out of The Sound of Music,” the mother of four shared.
“I had never given myself permission to feel, to be vulnerable, to be weak, to be brought to my knees, and the world did it to me,” Shriver explained on the Making Space With Hoda Kotb podcast in 2023. “And then I was like, ‘Okay, God, let’s go. I’m gonna take this and learn everything I can about my role and what I need to learn.'”
And yet she didn’t truly solve the problem of Maria until she started writing poetry. And that’s when the truth about what she experienced really came flooding out, many of her verses ripped from—as she wrote in her new book I Am Maria—”a place of fear, shame, confusion, and darkness.”
Not that all of those intense emotions derived only from the implosion of her marriage to Schwarzenegger after 25 years, the last seven of which they spent as governor and first lady of California.
But it turned out that the poise she showed in those first weeks, months and even years after their shocking May 2011 split announcement was a construct. On the inside, she was broken.
“It broke my heart, it broke my spirit, it broke what was left of me,” Shriver wrote in I Am Maria. “Without my marriage, my parents, a job—the dam of my lifelong capital-D Denial just blew apart.”
Shriver’s mother Eunice Shriver—one of President John F. Kennedy’s eight siblings—had died in 2009 and dad Sargent Shriver passed on Jan. 18, 2011, two weeks after Schwarzenegger left office. And Shriver, a veteran journalist, hadn’t been plying her trade while her husband was governor.
The scion of America’s most famous Democratic political dynasty and Schwarzenegger, an Austrian-born Republican movie star who served in President George H.W. Bush’s administration, may have been unlikely spouses on paper, but they were a true power couple.
And they had been through a lot already, including groping allegations against Schwarzenegger that ultimately didn’t hurt his candidacy for California governor in a 2003 recall election that saw him replace Democratic Gov. Gray Davis. (He admitted during a campaign rally that he had “behaved badly sometimes” and apologized.)
So when they did split up, it felt as if it came out of nowhere. Only, as the rest of the world soon found out, it most certainly did not.