Maria Shriver says it was ‘scary' to release her poetry book. Here's why she did it.

NBC News

02-04-2025

The photo on the cover of Maria Shriver's first poetry collection has a special meaning.
The "TODAY" contributor shares why she chose a childhood photo of herself with her beloved pony, Miss Buck, as the cover image for her new book, 'I Am Maria,' in an interview with TODAY.com.
'That horse was my best friend, my everything. There's a poem in there about her, and she was my home, and so I wanted to put her on there because she's the first person that didn't ask me my name,' Shriver says. 'She showed me unconditional love.'
Themes of longing, loneliness and the power of love — romantic, familial and self-love — are constant throughout Shriver's poetry collection, which begins with an introduction explaining how poetry became a part of her journey of self-exploration, and how her past connects with how she feels about herself now.
The former first lady of California wrote that she started writing poetry to help find herself after the loss of her mother and father, and to help heal from her divorce from her ex-husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to whom she was married for over 30 years.
Shriver says she would meet up with friends who would ask what she was up to, and she would tell them she was writing poems. When they asked to read one, she would share them.
A few of her friends suggested she release them, to which she always replied, 'No way, no way,' she says, until she started hearing more stories like what she had experienced in her life.
'We all have this universal longing to feel at home. We all have this universal desire to be at home in our lives, to be at home with ourselves, to feel seen, to feel loved, to feel accepted, and that's what this book is about,' she says.
'It's about looking at one's life — you have to go back so you can go forward,' she continues. 'It's about addressing those things, not being afraid of them, and incorporating them into your life, so that you can feel seen, feel accepted, first and foremost, by yourself.'
Shriver compares the feeling of needing someone to like, see or accept you for who you are as being on a 'hamster wheel forever.'
'If you see yourself, if you love yourself, if you accept yourself, if you forgive yourself, if you are living in your truth, then your life will take a very different turn,' Shriver says.
Even though Shriver has released seven other books, she says she was nervous to release all of her poems because of their vulnerability.
'I think they're powerful, but I think they're vulnerable,' she says. 'And so I think when you put your heart and your vulnerability out into the public square, it's scary, right? Because you run the risk of it being trampled on, you run the risk of your heart being made fun of, you run the risk of your heart being rejected ... but the greater risk was being afraid to do that.'
Shriver says she has always tried to live her life so that she's not afraid to do the things she has set her mind to.
'I was terrified to anchor for the first time. I was terrified to go on air. I was terrified to do the big interview. I was terrified to get married, to become a mother. I was terrified to get divorced, all of these things,' she says.
'There are milestones in life, when you lose a parent, when you lose a beloved animal, they're all things that we often think we can't get through, we can't survive,' she continues. 'Therefore we stuff them down and don't really deal with it, and that has its own challenges.'
Shriver says she tries to lead a life where she looks back and doesn't have any regrets, and that releasing the book was a way to feel her emotions and challenge herself to do something new.
'It was one of those things that, in many ways, I got out of my head to write these, to write the whole book, and it's a good thing for me to get out of my head,' Shriver says.
A group of poems she thought about not including in 'I Am Maria' are poems she wrote to each of her four children in honor of their 18th birthdays.
'I went back and forth on (including them),' she says. 'I took it out, I put it back in. I thought, well, they are what has given me sustenance. They are what made me want to move my life forward. They give me life. And so to exclude them from who I am means excluding a big part of my life, because they are the biggest part of my life.'
She shares she wrote the poems for her kids Katherine, Christina, Patrick and Christopher because she wanted them to see who she saw, and so that they could have her visions of themselves at 18 forever.
'It was something I wished, you know, 'Wow, I wonder what my mother thought of being 18,'' she says. 'What was that like? Who was I to her? So I wanted them to have that. This is a book, really, about looking at my life, the good, the bad, the wonderful, and they are my life.'
Shriver says her eldest daughter, Katherine, has read her new book, but she isn't sure about the others.
'I haven't really gotten a verdict from the other ones,' she says with a laugh. 'I'm lucky I'm not really waiting for anybody's verdict. In the past, I've always waited, every other book — I've written seven books — I've waited for my mother's approval, or someone else's.'
'With this one, I feel very at peace with it, and I'm not tracking it, waiting for someone to accept it, because I find myself at a very different place in my life,' she adds.
Shriver says she hopes readers will learn there is an artist in every person, whether they think they are creative or not. She describes her career as a journalist and working with facts to her new journey as as poet.
'This is a whole other path, right? I think we're all here to have as many paths as we can get through,' she says.