The Oprah Podcast
Oprah & Maria Shriver on Heartbreak, Healing, and Finding Your Way Home
25 Mar 2025
Chapter 1: Who are Oprah Winfrey's and Maria Shriver's lifelong friends?
This episode of the Oprah Podcast is presented by Lilly Direct, your online healthcare resource. Hello to you, dear podcast listener and YouTube watcher. I know your time is valuable, so I am thanking you all for taking the time to be with me here. My guest today is a long, long, long time friend, Maria Shriver.
Actually, Maria and I have been friends as long as Gail and I have been friends, and we all met in the same place at WJZ-TV in Baltimore. Correct. We met when we were both in our early 20s, so I've known you now for, we've been friends for 49 years.
Yeah.
And I knew that Maria was writing a book, and I asked her to send me her new book, I Am Maria, My Reflections and Poems on Heartbreak, Healing, and Finding Your Way Home. I have to tell you all and to tell you that I read this on a rainy day, sitting in my window seat, and I wept. I wept because I've known you all these years.
Maria Shriver has lived an extraordinary life, most of it in the public eye. She was born into American political royalty. Her father, Sergeant Shriver, was an American diplomat and was once a candidate for vice president of the United States. Her mother was Eunice Kennedy Shriver. She was the sister of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
Eunice was the founder of the Special Olympics. Maria grew up the only girl in her family with four brothers. In 1986, Maria married the world-famous actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who later became governor of California. Together, they have four children, Catherine, Christina, Patrick, and Christopher. They divorced in 2021.
Maria is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning journalist and former national news anchor. She served four years as First Lady of California. She's the creator of the award-winning digital publication, The Sunday Paper, which I love to read every week. Maria is the best-selling author of many books and one of the world's leading advocates for women's health and Alzheimer's research.
And now she is a loving and doting grandmother to her daughter Catherine's children with actor Chris Pratt, Lila, Eloise, and Ford. In this book, you have opened, literally opened your soul and allowed all of us who have any feelings of loss or grief or not being enough or not being able to show up for ourselves. You have led us to the open field. And bless you for that.
And I am so proud of you for that. And it's all in the form of poems. And you go places I thought you would never go. I want to say I really, really, really am just honored that you have become... and evolved into the woman that you are. And I'm so honored to have you as my friend.
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Chapter 2: How did Maria Shriver's upbringing influence her identity?
And I think that, you know, I think I started to think about in what way was I doing that? In what way did I have padded doors in my own life?
You write this about feeling terrified in your own home. You say everyone lives behind closed doors. I stand here, frozen in the darkness, terrified. My brothers can't help. They aren't yet men. As the sun begins to break through, I return to my room down the hall. I shut my door. Daylight is coming. One more night is over. I made it through again. What was it that was terrifying you?
Well, you know, both of my uncles had been killed. So there was this feeling in my family that people were getting killed. And so I thought, well, we're all going to get killed.
And out to
Yeah. And I lived in this house way out in the woods, lived next to a mental institution. And I just was terrified all the time. I was an only girl, as I said, and the feeling of like somebody's going to come in here, the house creaked. Yeah. the house. And it was scary.
Nobody talked about what it was and what had happened.
And nobody picked me up and said, it's going to be OK. What are you feeling? The idea of somebody talking to me about my feelings was so foreign. I don't think that happened until it was in my 20s or 30s or somebody would ask me how I feel. And I'd be like, fine. What? What do you mean? How do I feel? I don't know how I feel. Just keep going. Let's keep working.
And I think it wasn't until really, you know, conversations that we would have or that I'd start to be thinking, wow, I think I should be feeling something. I don't know what I'm feeling. And then as I became a mother, I started to feel. I, you know, gave birth. I was always terrified to become a mother.
But where was your father in all of this? So they slept in separate bedrooms, as a lot of people do. Mm-hmm. and your mother was at the end of the hall, did he know that you were and your brothers were trying to get in? Did he know?
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