When two career-minded people get married, is divorce inevitable? Perhaps not, but in the case of
author Salman Rushdie and model Padma Lakshmi, I got the feeling that for the marriage to survive, one of them had to put a few of the career goals on the back burner (or better yet, in deep freeze) and it wasn't going to be Mr. Literary Giant. Lakshmi, also an actress, TV host and cookbook author, seems to bear that out in a revealing Vanity Fair article.
With the show, the book, and multiple other projects, “I was, like, becoming less portable,” she said. “We had two homes and Salman would go back and forth between London and New York,” to visit his son Milan, “and it just seemed our schedules got so crazy and he has a very big life, too.
“I think he was genuinely proud of me, but I think while theoretically he wanted me to do well, in practical terms it meant that we would each be having to do different things, and I think that that was hard for him.”
She said that she had missed out on the last day of her photo shoot for Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet in order to catch a lecture Rushdie was giving at Emory University, in Atlanta, where he became the Distinguished Writer in Residence last spring. “I knew he was gonna be really pissed off if I didn’t make it down there,” she said. [Link]
"Join the club, Padma," Rushdie's three other ex-wives are probably saying. "We had to attend his lectures too. Otherwise he would give us a lecture."
"I sat down,” Padma said, “and I wrote him a long love letter by e-mail and said, ‘I’m writing to you as a woman who has loved you and stood next to you for eight years. And I’m asking you to do the unexpected with me, to take my hand and not fight about anything.’ And he called me the next day and we worked it out and part of us working it out was he wanted me gone,” as in out of his house. And she agreed. [Link]
Aren't you glad they "worked it out"? Because if they hadn't "worked it out," they might still be together.
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