Mother Mary Comes to Me

By: Arundhati Roy

Narrated by: Arundhati Roy

Named One of The New York Times Book Review’s Top Ten Books of the Year

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize

One of the best-reviewed books of the year, a raw and deeply moving memoir that “pulses with compassion and moral outrage” (The Wall Street Journal) from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that traces her complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life both as a woman and a writer.

In this, her first work of memoir, Arundhati Roy writes, “Perhaps even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject.”

Mother Mary Comes to Me, is an intimate chronicle, “full of precise imagery and blistering emotional intelligence” (The Washington Post), of the relationship between two women, a school teacher and a writer, who happen to be mother and daughter. Roy writes with a novelist’s unsettling ability to be inside her own story as well as outside it, simultaneously child and adult, attached and detached, protagonist and narrator. She describes how she came to be the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”

“Heart-smashed” by Mary’s death, 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.”

With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me “builds worlds that are revolutionary, made from the darkness that she spins into purpose” (The New Republic). An ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—Mother Mary Comes to Me is a memoir like no other.

Critic reviews

"This haunting and tender memoir is an insightful exploration of a mother-daughter relationship and India’s culture."

Mother Mary and The Stockholm Syndrome 😄

I don't know the wisdom in having a writer narrate his/her book. "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness" certainly didnt benefit from it. But this one feels about right. The strong accent and the mis-pronounced words, however wince-inducing, serve as a reminder that this is a woman born and raised in a non-English speaking [as a first language] world. A disadvantage which she not just over came but conquered and [even] thrived on. A tastament to the strength of.... something or someone... I am sure. [Despite, that is, the well-acknowledged priviledges Roy had from being "an organ child" of Mary Roy and the glazed-over relationship with the much older filmmaker lover turned husband.]

Be that as it may, does it feel like a joke, hearing how Roy's world was a world that championed white culture, literature, and language? An enviroment that worshipped at white people's altar while scrutinizing its fellow countrymen with undue severeity [so much that I asked on Blusky, after reading "My Seditious Heart", why anyone would call that "land of monstrosity" "home"]? A bit! How strange it is, that a writer, as self-aware as Arundhati Roy, doesnt seem to recognize the irony in that? Did it, moreover, make me wish that she wrote this one in one of the many languages spoken in Kerela/India, at least as a gesture.. to what colonization did to a beautiful country and a rich culture whose illness may need more than a century to cure? Indeed it did.

Still, I did get answers to questions I had about one of my favorite writers in the world ["The God Small Things".. how much do I love thee. Lemme count the ways...]

Questions like:
Why [on earth] architecture?
How end up in a movie?
When did she become an activist and why?
Married, but living apart?

A decent read.

The author has the best reading voice

what a dedication and history. so many parallels with our own lives make it that much more touching.

A real memoir

I am inspired by the honesty and healing shared in this book, personal, political, and spiritual. It is the best thing I’ve read this year: 2025.

Humanness

If you are a fan of arundati Roy fan I encourage you to take this in. Arundati is the reader.

So much emotion and history and complicated human beings

Very good read- very tough at times but honest and don’t simplify complex issues of relationships, conflict or government