Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi says Salman Rushdie called her a 'bad investment'

Padma Laksmi may have shot into the limelight on the shoulders of then-husband, famed author Salman Rushdie, but her career took a trajectory of its own when the model-turned-chef pursued her love of food. In her memoirs, Love, Loss and What We Ate, the Indian-born host of Top Chef has taken the lid off her tumultuous marriage with the Booker Prize winner.


"He's an extremely brilliant and charming, and layered and complicated man," the 45-year-old told NPR in an interview. "If you're someone who's like me, and especially Indian, it's sort of like meeting Hemingway in your twenties, you know?"

But Rushdie's need for constant attention took a toll on her, with her blossoming career making matters worse. "I just wanted my own identity," she told 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."

In her book, Lakshmi also makes mention of the Satanic Verses author's large appetite for sex. At the time of their three-year marriage, she was suffering from severe endometriosis, undiagnosed at the time, which left her in chronic pain and prevented her from having sex.