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Maria Shriver Opens Up on ‘Brutal’ Divorce From Arnold Schwarzenegger

The former California first lady’s new book, “I Am Maria,” details her journey with “grief.”

In a new book, Maria Shriver shares how her life took a “brutal” turn after her 25-year marriage to Arnold Schwarzenegger ended, People reports. The 69-year-old former first lady of California once had it good—as an NBC anchor, a Kennedy, and wife to the Austrian bodybuilder. In I Am Maria, out April 1, Shriver divulges her initial fascination with her ex-husband. “Thirty-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger looked and sounded different from anyone I’d ever met. My attraction to him was instantaneous,” she wrote, adding: “My family was shocked. No one understood my relationship with Arnold. 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.” Then her life came to a screeching halt in 2011. Her father, Sargent Shriver, passed away two years after the death of her mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, and her marriage to the actor and former Republican governor ended after she discovered he’d fathered a son with their housekeeper. Following her divorce, Shriver, who shares four children with Schwarzenegger—Katherine, 35, Christina, 33, Patrick, 31, and Christopher, 27—writes that she was “consumed with grief and wracked with confusion, anger, fear, sadness, and anxiety.” She also writes, “I was unsure now of who I was, where I belonged. Honestly, it was brutal, and I was terrified,” adding, “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.”