BOOK REVIEW: MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME By Arundhati Roy (London, Penguin, Hamish Hamilton, 2025)
Arundhati Roy's memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me is an intimate account of a daughter's grief at losing her mother. Written with both clarity and intensity, the memoir reflects on the turbulent mother-daughter relationship Roy shared with her single mother, Mary Roy. The memoir is uninhibited in describing the often cruel and ferocious relationship Mary Roy had with both her children, one that teetered on abuse. Yet in losing her mother, Arundhati Roy acknowledges that this relationship helped shape who she became as an adult. ‘She was my shelter and my storm.’
‘She was my shelter and my storm.’
Deeply intimate, the memoir dives into her own life, her childhood, her running away from home at sixteen, her relationships with men and women later in life. The memoir leaves us breathless and astonished by some of its revelations. Much of this will be familiar to readers of THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS, Roy’s 1997 Booker prize winning novel which draws heavily on her childhood in her maternal grandparent’s home in Kerala. What's different in this memoir is how much further she goes, digging deeper into the complexities of parenting and societal pressures and frustrations, the hardships her mother faced as a divorcée, the unjust rules that meant daughters would not inherit property, and the lifelong war Mary Roy waged against her own family as well as the system. Her frustrations and limitations in the face of societal pressure often found release in violent abuse, both physical and verbal, toward her children, and particularly toward her daughter.
And yet, by the end, Arundhati Roy finds it in herself not to forgive but to understand who her mother really was, and why she was so often pushed to the brink of blind, ferocious rage. That understanding is what turns this from a private reckoning into something larger, a remarkable memoir about love and passion, and about the laws of the land that women rallied against.
MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME: Arundhati Roy ( London, Hamish Hamilton, 2025)