Arundhati Roy

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.


Mother Mary Comes to Me

On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room. 

In church the priests said the same sort of thing about the poor that communists did, but they didn’t sound as though they meant it. 

The priests in church said it would be as difficult for the rich to go to heaven as it was for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. I imagined the rich were busy making a gigantic needle with a huge, camel-sized eye. 

It was almost as though for her to shine her light on her students and give them all she had, we — he and I — had to absorb her darkness. 

Today, though, I am grateful for that gift of darkness. I learned to keep it close, to map it, to sift through its shades, to stare at it until it gave up its secrets. 

Bhavana

— the land of son-worshippers. The land in which sons must be given more than daughters, more of everything- attention, love, money, education, inheritance, even food. The land of infanticide and female foeticide.

 A man's life was prescribed as medication to soothe a maddened nation.

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