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While Meghan Markle is gearing up to walk down the aisle with Prince Harry, a new book by Princess Diana’s biographer Andrew Morton is looking back on her first marriage — and its abrupt end.
In an excerpt from Meghan, A Hollywood Princess published by The Sunday Times this weekend, Morton reveals new details about Meghan’s relationship with Hollywood producer Trevor Engelson, who she was married to in 2011.
Morton writes in the book — out April 17 — that Meghan and Engelson met at a dive bar while she was getting her start in acting.
According to Meghan, A Hollywood Princess, Meghan was starting to work as an actress, nabbing a small sitcom role and joining Deal or No Deal.
When Meghan got her break in Suits, the show filmed in New York and then Canada, meaning the actress would be based away from her then-new fiancé.
Meghan and Engelson thought “the sacrifice was going to be worth it,” Morton writes, noting that it was just a month before the wedding when Suits was renewed for a second season, confirming that the long-distance nature of their romance would continue.
The duo tied the knot in 2011, in what a bridesmaid recalls to Morton was a “moving wedding,” complete with the couple writing their own vows.
Then Meghan flew back to Canada after the celebration for filming. Morton writes inThe Sunday Times excerpt that it wasn’t long before “cracks began to appear in their marriage.”
Markle announced the end of their two-year marriage in the summer of 2013, and they officially divorced a year later. But the separation was “totally out of the blue” for Engelson, according to Morton.
“Trevor went from cherishing Meghan to, as one friend observed, ‘feeling like he was a piece of something stuck to the bottom of her shoe,’ ” writes Morton.
Although it used to be quite controversial for a member of the royal family to wed a divorcee, they have loosened their stance in recent decades.
In 2002, the General Synod – the governing body of the Church of England – voted to recognise “that some marriages regrettably do fail.” They added, “there are exceptional circumstances in which a divorced person may be married in church during the lifetime of a former spouse.” Any decision “as to whether or not to solemnise such a marriage in church after divorce rests with the minister.”
Although the Queen and Prince Philip will celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary on November 20, three of their four children have been divorced. (All but Prince Edward.)
In 2005, when Prince Charles wed his now-wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall — who has also been divorced — they married in a civil ceremony, because having a religious ceremony was “too controversial at the time,” Scot Peterson, a research fellow in Constitutional Studies at the University of Oxford, previously told PEOPLE. After the first ceremony, they had a service of blessing at nearby St. George’s Chapel in Windsor in April 2005.
This article originally appeared on PEOPLE
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