I am Maria My reflections and poems on heartbreak, healing, and finding your way home

After a demanding, award-winning journalism career and tireless work as an activist on many fronts, Shriver has dedicated herself to writing and publishing books that illuminate paths to self-care. Here she shares the key to how she found a way forward after devastating losses: writing poetry. Not literary poetry, but wholly personal poetry expressing and exploring "raw, authentic" emotions; poetry as an "awe-generating craft" and a "healing tool." This collection is a "journey in poetry" that chronicles her quest to understand her struggles and embrace her true self. Shriver begins with a powerful summary of her often-lonely childhood as a member of the legendary, tragedy-afflicted Kennedy clan, her parents' deaths, and her 25-year marriage to body builder, actor, and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, with whom she had four children, and its excruciatingly public detonation. Shriver's openhearted, easily read poems, with universal feelings at their core, chart her painful yet liberating self-analysis leading to self-love. The goal of her poetry is "to embrace the whole of life . . . to grow and evolve." She encourages everyone to do the same.