Among the controversial work of author Salman Rushdie, he is also known for the number of marriages he has been through. Although gossip magazines speculated about the reasons for each of them breaking up, we really don’t know what went on behind closed doors.

But now, his ex-wife Padma Lakshmi, the host of Top Chef and former model, has reportedly revealed the dark side of Rushdie in her memoir Love, Loss and What We Ate. In an interview to People magazine about her book, 45-year-old Padma Lakshmi has given shocking details about her marriage to Salman Rushdie and why it broke.

According to Padma Lakshmi, her marriage to Rushdie was marred with insecurity and jealousy. The author, according to her memoir, needed to be consoled every time he did not win the Nobel Prize for literature. She also says that her professional success made him jealous. When she was featured on the cover of Newsweek, Rushdie’s response to his wife was far from encouraging. The Telegraph reports that he grudgingly said, “The only time Newsweek put me on their cover was when someone was trying to put a bullet in my head.”

“I just wanted my own identity,” Padma Lakshmi tells People magazine. “I was making the transition out of one stage of my life and into another. But in order to do that, it required that I wasn’t everywhere that he needed me to be.”

Rushdie and Padma Lakshmi met in 1999, at a party in New York, when 51-year-old Rushdie was still married to his third wife. They were married in 2004. In the beginning, Padma Lakshmi says, their marriage was blissful. They would divide their time between New York and London, and he would make her breakfast in bed.

After his marriage to Padma Lakshmi ended, Rushdie was in a relationship with American actor Pia Glenn. When that relationship also broke up, Glenn said that Rushdie was “cowardly, dysfunctional and immature” and that he could not stop talking about Padma Lakshmi.