Ex-wife’s memoir paints harsh picture of Rushdie
Padma Lakshmi describes how her ex-husband called her a ‘bad investment’
A new book by Salman Rushdie’s fourth wife, Top Chef judge Padma Lakshmi, paints the acclaimed author as jealous, insecure and cold. Lakshmi, an Indian-American model and cookbook author, released the memoir Love, Loss and What We Ate on Tuesday.
The official Harper-Collins Canada description of the book doesn’t mention Rushdie by name.
However, online accounts Tuesday boasted headlines like “Padma Lakshmi on Sex, Salman Rushdie and the End of Her Tempestuous Marriage”; “Padma Lakshmi dishes out details of her sexually demanding marriage to Salman Rushdie”; and “Salman Rushdie called me a ‘bad investment’ when our marriage broke down.”
One excerpt concerns Lakshmi’s inability to have sex due to endome- triosis, a condition that involves tissue that lines the uterus and can involve severe pelvic pain. The book says Rushdie was angered by the lack of intimacy.
In an interview, Lakshmi told People magazine that Rushdie also grew resentful as her career took off in the food industry.
And in the book, she described having to console Rushdie every year when the Nobel Prize for literature went to someone else.
“Imagine a young woman in her 20s, who loves books and who had published her little cookbook and in comes this guy,” Lakshmi told People. She described how she and Rushdie first met in 1999, when she was 28, and he was 51 and already married.
“I mean, he was the best thing that ever happened to me by a mile.”
Rushdie is the acclaimed author of The Satanic Verses, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2008 and won the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children.
He and Lakshmi married in 2004 and the marriage lasted three years.