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Mother Mary Comes to Me
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About This Book
A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that traces the complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati's life both as a woman and a writer. Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy's first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as "my shelter and my storm." "Heart-smashed" by her mother Mary's death in September 2022 yet puzzled and "more than a little ashamed" by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, "not because I didn't love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her." And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author's journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and essays, through today. With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.
Reviews
"May pack the same 'heart-smashing' wallop on readers."
"Roy herself makes the case that her worldview stems from the feeling of dread—'the cold moth on my heart'—that she knew as the wounded, ever-vigilant daughter of Mary Roy."
"Pulses with compassion and moral outrage ..."
"Roy and a withering polemic about India's political ills ..."
"There's a deeper purpose at work here ..."
"She refers to the 'knotted feelings, all that twisted, matted anger' of the childhood trauma that lives inside her, but also to the 'foetid threads of caste and feudal hierarchy' in India, the duality of a world that is threatening but also beloved."
"Neither too bleak nor overly conciliatory, the account does justice to often-irresolvable feelings of familial ambivalence."
"An intimate, stirring chronicle."
"It's the kind of book that actually makes a reader think about how a book gets made, especially when all the necessary parts are there but somehow do not seem to get properly knit together."
"This attempt to understand the compulsion to love what seems hostile transforms Roy's writing, lending her prose, especially in the first 130 or so pages, an unprecedented freedom ..."
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