Book review: Arundhati Roy's candid memoir, about her relationship with mother Mary Roy, is unputdownable

Book cover of 'Mother Mary Comes to Me', and author Arundhati Roy. (Images via Penguin Hamish Hamilton and X)

Towards the end of her 374-page memoir ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’, Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy writes: “I felt terrible for her (her being the writer’s mother). Even now when I think about it, I am not entirely on my side.” The declaration comes as part of a segment where Roy describes her mother, Mary Roy, telling her about the ways in which she had tried to abort her second child – the writer – by eating raw papaya and with a coat hanger. “I am the outcome of their failure to deliver on their promise as abortion-inducers. From that failure came the litany of ‘I wish I had dumped you in an orphanage’, ‘You’re a millstone around my neck’, ‘All my sickness is because of you’ and, of course, ‘Bitch’,” Roy continues.

Launched on September 2, ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’ recounts in exquisite detail, the ways that Mary Roy – a women’s rights activist, educator who started the Pallikoodam school in Kottayam and a mercurial mom – impacted the Booker Prize-winning author’s life and work.

(cropped image) Arundhati Roy at an event in April 2010. (Image credit: JeanBaptisteParis via Wikimedia Commons)

Here’s a quick recap of 'Mother Mary Comes to Me': Arundhati Roy is the second child of Mary Roy and “Micky Roy the boxer’s boy”. Mary Roy leaves her alcoholic tea-estate-manager husband in the aftermath of the 1962 Indo-China war, taking the kids with her to Kolkata and then Ooty, where her late father had built a home. Money is tight, and Mary Roy’s health is poor. A property dispute cuts them off from the extended family. The children, Arundhati and her older brother Lalith, are mostly neglected. When they are suffered by their mother, it often ends in Mary flying into a rage. Mary Roy is almost tyrannical at home – lording over her children and a growing cast of schoolteachers and home staff – but she is also a brilliant woman and an independent thinker. She’s able to forge alliances with the best minds of the time – for instance, her school and home are designed by Laurie Baker who becomes a lifelong friend, and an influence on Arundhati Roy who ends up studying architecture at one of the best schools for the subject in India. Throughout the book, Arundhati Roy addresses her mother as Mrs Roy, like the children in her boarding school. There’s a cool distance, but also a daughter's fiercely protective love for her mother and mentor who encouraged her to write her thoughts from the time she could hold a pencil and read to her from a vast selection of literature. Arundhati Roy writes how, for years, she thought of herself as her severely asthmatic mother’s “valiant organ child”. And while the connection between mother and daughter changes over time, its intensity seems to have remained undiminished till Mary Roy’s death on September 1, 2022.

There’s a terrific amount of what can only be described as abuse in Arundhati Roy's early years (though Roy hasn’t called it that in her book), where Roy is asked to “get out” of cars and homes with frightful regularity from a very young age, and criticised sharply for everything from the way she makes (or does not make) conversation to her life choices. But equally there is an unadulterated love, almost veneration by the author, for a woman who was to become a role model to many.

For fans of ‘The God of Small Things’, the memoir is also an account of everything you might have wanted to know about the author of ‘The God of Small Things’, winner of the 1997 Booker Prize. Roy describes her creative process throughout the book. Like how, before she could begin writing it, she needed to find and devour her "live language-animal", to find a “language that I used, not language that used me.” But she also has a chapter titled – helpfully – “The God of Small Things”, where she describes what was happening in her life in the four years it took her to finish the novel.

Difficult, but beautiful

As you might expect, Arundhati Roy’s writing in the book is crisp – the turn of phrase often pleasantly surprising  – even, or perhaps especially, when she is describing cruelty, abuse, and the ways in which her mother’s disappointments and expectations haunted her even after she left home to study, then make art and films, and finally write books.

Most of us – Mummy-Daddy people, as Roy calls us – remember little about our childhood. Horrors and highlights excepted. Roy remembers much about her young years. There’s a haunting description of how Arundhati, aged 4, showed her chickenpox-dotted stomach to strangers walking past her home. When one such stranger thought to bring the infection to her guardian’s attention, Arundhati recalls being rebuked and slapped for baring her belly in public.

Across ages 6, 7, 9, Roy describes feeling like she had “swirled like water down a sink and disappeared” when she was admonished unfairly and harshly – which, going by this memoir, happened often. It would be interesting to hear what a child psychologist might make of these passages in ‘Mother Mary’, and the remarkable way they capture the mind of a tot who would be conditioned over years to be constantly prepared and on guard. At various stages of her life, Roy writes about a “cold moth” that settles over her heart – often when she’s in a really good place in her life – pushing her to self-destruct that “safest of places”.

The burden - and freedom - of the literary memoir (as opposed to, say, an autobiography) is to shine a torch on one particular aspect or part of the author's life. 'Mother Mary Comes to Me' is all about Arundhati Roy's relationship with her mother - and because her mother was such a large presence in her life, she seems to be in the wings, just a thought away, even in passages where Arundhati puts physical distance between them.

The narrative is linear, and an assorted cast of Roy's friends, lovers, coworkers, neighbours and others walks in and out of the pages. There are segments devoted to family members, especially her brother LKC, uncle G. Isaac - the amateur model-plane builder and pickle-factory owner who showed her it was okay to fail - and father, Micky Roy. The core unit throughout the book, however, remains Mary and Arundhati Roy - Roy has talked about how the book grew out of her grief over Mary Roy's death, a grief that she says shocked her.

Writers and families

It’s in the early pages – where we see Arundhati Roy negotiating an inner friction of wanting to love her mother and being pushed away by her; of trying to get away from her but being drawn back in; of making her own place in the world and finding aspects of Mrs Roy in herself – that the memoir bristles with an energy that demands attention.

In a recent interview to ‘The New York Times’, Roy explained why she had to write this memoir: “What was incredible about her (Mary Roy) was that there was a part of her that hammered me but then it also created me. There was this public part of her, which was so extraordinary, so I could never settle on what I really thought or felt. The entire range was a challenge to me as a writer: Can I put down this unresolvable character?”

Incidentally, 'Mother Mary Comes to Me' is the second literary memoir - or creative nonfiction, if you prefer that label - to come out in 2025 that deals with a well-known writer’s relationship with their parents. Earlier in the year, Jeet Thayil’s evocatively titled ‘Elsewhereans’ had him following in his journalist father’s and mother's footsteps, going to places his parents went as young(er) people, and meeting people who had been important to them. As with 'Mother Mary', the writing of 'Elsewhereans' was triggered by the writer's mother's death.

(Image credit: Harper Collins)

There’s a lyrical quality to Thayil’s memoir that lingers. Even as the documentary novel dips in and out of the past; juxtaposing a long-ago Kerala, Mumbai, Vietnam, Hong Kong with more recent travels. But there’s also that engagement with and – sometimes belated – understanding of parents as (fallible) people in their own right; with lives outside of the family life.

But where ‘Elsewhereans’ is a comparatively easy read, folding into a kind of travelogue-memoir-documentary novel - Thayil's peripatetic family has lived in Hong Kong, America, Kerala, Mumbai, Bangalore, and elsewhere for years - ‘Mother Mary’ remains challenging almost to the last. In one place Roy writes she wanted to hug her mother and reassure her, but “you can’t hug a porcupine. Not even over the phone.”

Front and back covers of Arundhati Roy's memoir – 'Mother Mary Comes to Me', which released on September 2.

How to read 'Mother Mary Comes to Me'

Roy does offer cues to how to read this book. At the very start, she asks that you “read this book as you would a novel. It makes no larger claim. But then, there could be no larger claim.”

Whether she’s accounting for the untrustworthiness of old memories when she writes this, or offering us a soft landing before we begin to read about her difficult childhood, it is a useful suggestion to carry on reading as we see the protagonist of the work grow up from an expletives-spewing toddler to a bristly teen who travels to Delhi with a knife in her bag and picks up odd jobs – including making garish art for exhibitions at Pragati Maidan and working as an actress – to pay the bills and lives in strange places (a place where her neighbours think she is a drug mule, a room where a monkey sleeps under her bed one night holding a dead puppy) till her financial concerns ease.

The cover of the book also tells a story. If you put the open book down flat, it looks like present-day Roy (on the back cover) is looking at a younger Arundhati on the front cover – a lit bidi in one hand, silver hoops and ring, hair still decidedly “un-Vietnamese” – looking up and away into the distance. There’s an echo of this image in the introduction to the memoir, too. Roy writes: “Perhaps what I am about to write is a betrayal of my younger self by the person I have become. If so, it’s no small sin. But I’m in no position to be the judge of that.”

After reading 370-odd pages, one might agree that we’re definitely in no position to judge her either.