Padma Lakshmi says her husband Salman Rushdie called her "a bad investment" and was insensitive to her struggle with endometriosis.

She stood by him as he lived under a fatwa, but he accused her of using her ailment as an excuse not to have sex with him. She decided it was better to live alone, "free to wallow in my malaise, and nurse myself without seeing the disappointment in his face." She has a new memoir, and as she tells it, he said "You have the right to tell your side of the story as you see it."

He's written about her after all, in a memoir where he calls her his "Illusion" and — as the NYT puts it in "Padma Lakshmi Opens Up About Rushdie in Memoir" — he "describes her as irrational, vapid and vain."

“Her feelings for him — he would learn — were real, but intermittent,” he wrote. “She was ambitious in a way that often obliterated feeling. They would have a sort of life together — eight years from first meeting to final divorce, not a negligible length of time — and in the end, inevitably, she broke his heart as he had broken Elizabeth’s.” He also suggested that she was competitive with him ”and thought he was blocking her light.”

Picture 1 is Rushdie with Elizabeth. Picture 2 is Rushdie with Lakshmi. The NYT has the word "Elizabeth's" without any antecedent. I had to guess that Elizabeth was his previous wife. I Googled and learned about Elizabeth West, who was his third wife.

‘You saw an illusion and you destroyed your family for it,’ Elizabeth would tell him, and she was right.

Ah, "Illusion" is West's word for Lakshmi.

"The Worst Reality TV Judges of All Time."

From Padma Lakshmi to Twiggy.