Author’s passions often become next book
Projects released by Schwarzenegger Pratt personal, but not very revealing
Katherine Schwarzenegger Pratt has no complaints.
If you ask the oldest daughter of Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger about her life, she will tell you that her childhood was lovely, her career is fulfilling, her husband, actor Chris Pratt, is “rock solid,” and that she has “great parents, great siblings, amazing friends.” She always wanted to be a mother, and now she has two daughters. Even the paparazzi that track her and Pratt at coffee shops and the farmers market do not bother her so much.
“I feel like I was very prepared,” she said recently of stepping further into the spotlight via her marriage to the Marvel star.
Schwarzenegger Pratt, 33, was reflecting on her stage in life one recent January morning while sitting on a picnic bench in Will Rogers State Historic Park in Los Angeles.
The park is just a short hike from her family’s old home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, where Schwarzenegger Pratt lived with her parents, her sister, Christina, and her two brothers, Patrick and Christopher, until right around the time her father became governor of California.
Schwarzenegger Pratt and Pratt have made their own home together in the Palisades, and they bring their children to the park whenever Pratt isn’t off filming another blockbuster. (The couple are parents to Lyla, 2, and Eloise, 8 months, as well as Jack, 10, Pratt’s son from his first marriage to actor Anna Faris.)
Schwarzenegger Pratt
said she spends most days caring for her daughters and dashing in and out of her home office to work on different media projects. When she finds something she is passionate about, she often writes a book about it. Her latest passion is sisterhood, and she has explored it in the recently released illustrated children’s book “Goodnight, Sister.”
When Schwarzenegger Pratt started writing the book two years ago, she modeled the characters after herself and her younger sister, Christina, she said. But she had another idea in the back of her mind, too. “I started writing the book right after I had Lyla, and I was like, ‘Oh, this would be so cute if one day she had a sister.’ ”
She finished the text, and lo and behold, she soon found out she was pregnant with her second daughter. She gave birth to Eloise in May, and when Schwarzenegger Pratt travels
to promote the book’s release, she plans on bringing both girls with her.
In many ways, the author has created a version of her own childhood for her daughters. Like her mother, she has built a career as an author and media personality, and also married a famous actor. She lives minutes from where she grew up and regularly visits both parents, who separated in 2011 and finalized their divorce in 2021. Shriver hosts a weekly mommy-and-me class for Lyla and her friends, and Schwarzenegger keeps a miniature pony in his backyard that the girls love to pet.
Schwarzenegger Pratt may have had a relatively private childhood, but once she got to college, she wasted no time starting a public-facing career. She landed her first book deal at age 19, when she was a sophomore at the University of Southern
California. That book, “Rock What You’ve Got: Secrets to Loving Your Inner and Outer Beauty from Someone Who’s Been There and Back,” was inspired by a summer she spent interning at the PR company that handled Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign. It became a New York Times bestseller, and she went on to publish two more nonfiction books for adults — “I Just Graduated, Now What?” in 2014 and “The Gift of Forgiveness” in 2020 — as well as a children’s book, “Maverick and Me,” inspired by her rescue dog, in 2017.
A few months after Lyla was born, she also began hosting a weekly interview series on Instagram, where she has 1 million followers. On the show called “BDA Baby” — that’s “before, during and after baby” — she talks to other celebrities and experts about pregnancy and parenting.
Schwarzenegger Pratt
tends to pick projects based on whatever she is going through at the time, she said. She wrote “I Just Graduated, Now What?” for example, when she was trying to figure out what to do with her career after graduation. Her work is personal, then, but not particularly revealing. On “BDA Baby,” she lets her guests do most of the sharing, and in her books, she avoids making any disclosures that could end up in the tabloids.
Though Schwarzenegger Pratt grew up with a famous last name, she started dealing with a new level of tabloid attention when she got together with Pratt in 2018. Paparazzi showed up to their picnic dates, and suddenly interviewers were asking Schwarzenegger Pratt about her personal life.
She said she liked to keep most aspects of their relationship private but shared that the two met in church. Schwarzenegger Pratt is Catholic — she is the granddaughter of a Kennedy, after all. Pratt, she said, was baptized Catholic but grew up going to other Christian churches. The two eventually crossed paths at Zoe Church, a hip evangelical church in Los Angeles.
The couple married in 2019, and Schwarzenegger Pratt insists that their daily life is not particularly glamorous. “If you would ask anybody how I was at home, they’d be like, ‘She walks around with her hair in a banana clip and a box of crackers with one of the children on her hip.’ ”
But occasionally the Pratts have had to deal with some of the downsides of fame. In 2020, social media users declared Pratt the worst of all the men named Chris in Hollywood in an unofficial poll. The following year, Pratt caught some backlash for an Instagram post praising Schwarzenegger Pratt. Among other things, he thanked her for giving birth to their “healthy daughter,” which some commenters read as a dig at Pratt’s first wife, Faris (their son, Jack, was born prematurely). Pratt told Men’s Health last year that the response made him cry.
Schwarzenegger Pratt handles these kinds of intrusions so gracefully, it raises the question: Would she ever get into politics?
“No,” she answered firmly, laughing. “It’s really hard, it’s a lot of work, and I think if you grew up in it, you either see it and say, ‘Oh that’s something that I want to do,’ or you look at it and say, ‘I have respect for it, but it’s not for me.’ And I have respect for it, but it’s not for me.”
And if Pratt were to run for office?
“I mean, I think I would probably have to tackle that when and if that ever happened,” she said. “I’ve just learned so much from my experience having my dad and my mom be in that, that I would really want to talk about that.”
So that is one way in which Schwarzenegger Pratt hopes her life deviates from that of her parents. But as for the rest of it, she maintains that it’s all working out perfectly.
“I want to be like how my parents always raised us,” she said, “to work really hard and to be really good people and to leave the world a better place.”