Maria Shriver was once held up as the woman who “had it all.” The big career as a network news anchor. The Kennedy lineage. The high profile marriage to Arnold Schwarzenegger — and their four beautiful kids. That was before her mid-50s, when life as she knew it drastically changed. Her 25-year marriage imploded, her beloved parents, Eunice and Sergeant Shriver, both died, and her job as the first lady of California was now over. Bereft at first, she began to dig deep, learning who she really was behind “all the trappings.” Surprisingly, writing poetry helped — especially when it came to tapping emotions she’d long held deep inside: feelings of anxiety, grief and a lack of self worth. Now 69, the mom of four — Katherine, 35, Christina, 33, Patrick, 31, and Christopher, 27 — (and a grandma to three) has written a new book, I Am Maria, a collection of personal poems and intimate reflections, which Booklist describes as “openhearted, easily read poems, with universal feelings at their core." Shriver’s close friend Oprah Winfrey calls it “astonishing” and says, “I read this book on a rainy day, sitting in my window seat, and I wept. In this book she has opened her soul and allowed all of us—anyone who has ever experienced feelings of loss or grief or not being enough—in. Maria’s poems lead us to the open field, a place of self-love, healing, and home.” In an exclusive excerpt below, Shriver reveals a surprising vulnerability and the deep emotional pain she’d long kept hidden. In 2000 I published the bestseller Ten Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Went Out into the Real World because I wanted to share all the lessons I’d learned about love, marriage, kids, and how to navigate your way into a high-powered career—everything I thought you needed to know if you wanted to “have it all,” as I thought I did. I was forty-five years old, and I ended the book with “I’ll get back to you in ten years.” But when I did turn fifty-five, I was in no emotional shape to write a book. I was barely able to get out of bed. So much for my delusions of self-awareness. You see, I grew up in a big, competitive Irish Catholic family, where you didn’t sit around and talk about your feelings. When I looked around my family, I saw that if you weren’t doing—if you weren’t accomplishing and accomplishing BIG—then you weren’t even seen. It’s 1960, and I’m almost five years old. We live in Chicago, and we’re standing outside in the freezing cold in front of a big office building. As people rush in and out, my mother is introducing herself, and asking them to vote for her brother, John F. Kennedy, for president. My uncle Jack’s subsequent victory brings a whirlwind of change. My mother immediately starts pressuring her brother to create a President’s Panel on Mental Retardation. In honor of their intellectually disabled sister, Rosemary. My mother is also turning our home and our backyard into a summer camp for hundreds of children with intellectual disabilities and dedicated volunteers—a camp that will eventually grow into the International Special Olympics movement. The home she shared with her parents, Eunice and Sargent Shriver, and four brothers, plus a menagerie of animals, was always bustling with people from all walks of life. Everywhere we went, people greeted us with squeals of excitement and appreciation—their reaction to the Kennedy accomplishments, glamour, wealth, fame, and great teeth and hair. “Hey, aren’t you a Kennedy?” “You’re Caroline, right?” “I’m Maria Shriver.” Disappointment would cloud their faces. The message was burned into my little brain: Maria isn’t enough. Fighting that message became my lifetime motivation. The assassinations of her two uncles, President Kennedy in 1963, followed by Bobby Kennedy, five years later, in 1968, marked her forever. 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. 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. What I heard was, “Buck up…” In 1972, presidential candidate George McGovern picked her father as his vice presidential running mate, and she joined him on the campaign planes. There, she fell in love with the world of journalism. She began working at a local television station after graduating from Georgetown University. Then she met the Austrian bodybuilder who swept her off her feet. Thirty-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger looked and sounded different from anyone I’d ever met. My attraction to him was instantaneous. Like me, Arnold was also in the Big Expectations business. He told me “I want you to go for it, and I won’t stop you—because I want to go for it, too.” It was a turn-on. 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. And with time, I made another decision: to take a shot at being in front of the camera. I was told I had to lose weight (lots of it), go to a voice coach to learn how to sound like an anchorwoman, and dye my hair blonde. I did two out of three. The following spring, [in 1986], Arnold and I got married. And just like my mother, I was racing round at a hundred miles an hour, and nothing could stop me—not a cousin’s fatal drug overdose, not another cousin’s fatal ski accident, or a third cousin’s deadly plane crash. Fast-forward to 2003 and kapow! My movie-star husband abruptly decided he wanted to run for governor of California. And then before I knew what hit me, my network news bosses called to ask me for my resignation, because they said my having a politician for a husband gave the appearance of a conflict of interest. I was now “the Kennedy married to Arnold Schwarzenegger.” I came up with a new plan: I’ll become an amazing First Lady of California! Oh, and I’ll be home every night for dinner. Her mother’s death in 2009 left a lasting heartbreak. Then a year and a half later, all hell seemed to break loose. My First Lady job came to an end. My father died. And then came another devastating, life-altering blow: my twenty-five-year-long marriage blew up. 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. Now, much has been written about the end of my marriage, and frankly I don’t feel like I need or want to discuss it here, or anywhere. That said, I do want to take a moment to acknowledge the grace, valor, and courage my children exhibited. Everything about their world and the sanctity of their home got uprooted in an instant. 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. 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. I won’t bore and exhaust you with the details of my self-pity party. I’m also going to spare you a litany of all my trips to various therapists, healers, shamans, and psychics. I even went across the country to a cloistered convent. At the end of my stay there, Mother Dolores took me aside, and in what once again felt like a scene right out of The Sound of Music, said to me, “Maria. I understand that you like it here very much. But if you’re thinking you can come live with us, let me tell you, you can’t. Our cut-off age is fifty, and you’re fifty-five!” She said, “I think what you’re really looking for, my child, is permission to leave your marriage, to be Maria.” She hugged me, and then we both wept. 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. 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. 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. I’ve made lots of mistakes. One of them was tying my self-worth to my achievements. Another big mistake was thinking that someone outside of me could guarantee my safety, my worth, and my peace. I’ve also had to come face to face with other misguided beliefs — about aging, about being alone. I used to believe that if you didn’t have a partner, you must be unworthy and unloveable. I’ve learned that nothing could be further from the truth. At first, I didn’t want anyone to read my poems, as they are deeply personal, and I worried they would not measure up to the classic definition of what poetry is. But eventually, I showed some of them to a few close friends, and they urged me to share them, because my poems ignited their own self-discovery. Poetry is incredibly powerful and can help you tap into your unconscious, where so many insights are hidden. I believe anyone can do it and feel its power in their own life, as I have in my own. From I AM MARIA by Maria Shriver, to be published on April 1, 2025 by The Open Field, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (C) 2025 by Maria Shriver. Hear Maria Shriver and Oprah Winfrey discuss her new book! In a revealing new interview on The Oprah Podcast, available on Oprah’s YouTube channel and wherever you listen to podcasts, Shriver calls the book "an exploration of my life." I Am Maria will be published on April 1 and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.