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".... From Goodreads
I first was drawn to Arundhati Roy's memoir by the haunting photograph on the cover. Reading more about the book, I realized that "Mother Mary" was a reference to Arundhati's own mother and the complex relationship she had with her. In her Booker Prize winning novel (1997), The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy brings us into her "fictional" India, but here we learn of her real life in India. On my wishlist, and thinking now of re-reading The God of Small Things too (which I just saw was $1.99 on Kindle today)
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy published by Scribner, Sept. 2025
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