When a writer honestly evokes the conflicting memories of family and social experience through words and sentences, the contours of both family and society begin to emerge distinctly. The environment and era in which they write inevitably reflect in the literature they create. Even when the writing takes the form of a memoir or autobiography, the writer becomes a representative and chronicler of their time. Because they document both their familial history and the political and social events. With ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’, Indian writer Arundhati Roy seems to walk in the footsteps of two of my favorite authors, Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux and the iconic Isabel Allende. While Ernaux’s work is deeply autobiographical, many of Allende’s writings also fall within this literary tradition.
Arundhati Roy’s first two novels, ‘The God of Small Things’ and ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’, precede ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’, and both are complete works of fiction. Her debut novel, ‘The God of Small Things’, published in 1997, is not strictly autobiographical. Yet, upon release, it stirred a storm in the literary world. Set in a small town in Kerala, South India, the novel revolves around a family and the lives of twin siblings, Rahel and Estha. Their mother, despite being confident and gifted, faces the challenges of being a woman in a conservative society. Her forbidden love and the subsequent struggles form a crucial part of the narrative.
In essence, ‘The God of Small Things’ delves deep into themes of love, social inequality, family, and the consequences of societal norms. Through vibrant storytelling and intricate character development, Roy crafts a narrative that captures the complexities and subtleties of human relationships. The book received international acclaim and won the Booker Prize, bringing Roy not only immense recognition but also a kind of invaluable freedom. Yet that fame, she later described, felt like a ‘golden cage’–escaping it became her next challenge.
Her second novel, ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’, was published twenty years later in 2017. It is a sprawling political and humanitarian tale, portraying characters and realities from across India. While both of these books are full-fledged novels, her third book, ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’, is not a novel; it is a memoir in every sense. In an interview with The Hindu, the book is described as “a window into her mother’s world, as well as her own.” Roy herself said, “I wrote this book about events in my life. Perhaps my mother needed a daughter who was a writer. And perhaps I needed a mother like her.”
‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’ is Arundhati Roy’s first memoir; intimate and inspiring in equal measure. In it, she traces the trajectory of how she became the Arundhati Roy we know today. That becoming was shaped not only by turbulent circumstances but even more profoundly by her complex relationship with her extraordinary, single mother. Roy describes her mother as “my shelter and my storm.” One cannot resist quoting her vivid description: “She was woven through it all, taller in my mind than any billboard, more perilous than any river in spate, more relentless than the rain, more present than the sea itself.”
In September 2022, the death of her mother Mary Roy left Arundhati “heartbroken.” She was ‘stunned and slightly ashamed’ by the intensity of her own reaction. That emotional rupture became the driving force behind ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’. She was compelled to search for meaning in the feelings that surged after her mother’s passing. After all, this was the mother she had left at the age of eighteen; not out of a lack of love, but to preserve the love that remained. Her death triggered a cascade of questions: Why did it hurt so much? What was buried beneath that pain?
Thus began a memoir that is at once astonishing, at times uncomfortable, and surprisingly laced with humor. It spans her childhood in Kerala, her mother’s struggles, her dual nature, and Roy’s journey as a writer. But this is no placid memoir. It is a narrative shaped by upheaval and complexity, with Mary Roy at its center.
Crucially, the power of Mother Mary Comes to Me rests not just in its disclosures but in its literary architecture. Roy, an acclaimed novelist, employs a sophisticated narrative structure. The chronology is deliberately fractured; the memoir operates less like a linear life account and more like a mosaic where moments from childhood, young adulthood, and her current life as an activist are interspersed. This shifts in temporal perspective mirrors the nonlinear nature of memory itself; a traumatic memory from age nine can be as vivid and present as a recent political event.
Roy’s voice is immediately distinctive: fiercely intellectual yet intensely vulnerable. She moves seamlessly between the lyricism of a poet and the forensic precision of a political essayist. The memoir is rich with potent metaphors, often drawing from the natural world to describe her mother and her emotional landscape. For example, describing her mother as “more perilous than any river in spate, more relentless than the rain,” elevates Mary Roy from a mere biographical figure to an elemental force, a metaphor for both nurturing and destructive power. These stylistic decisions allow the text to bridge the intensely personal with the universal.
Mary was a formidable woman who carved out a space for herself in Kerala’s patriarchal society. Her legal battles; especially for Christian women’s inheritance rights; were not just personal victories but landmark moments for an entire generation of women. At the same time, she was the most volatile force in Arundhati’s childhood. Her severity, sudden cruelty, and equally sudden tenderness made her a deeply complex human portrait. Roy calls her both ‘gangster’ and ‘refuge.’ This duality resides not only in Mary but also within Arundhati herself.
Her childhood memories are marked by harsh words, physical discipline, and a strange regime of control. Her mother called nine-year-old Arundhati a ‘bitch,’ labeling her brother a ‘male chauvinist pig,’or forbidding her children from being addressed by name at school. These experiences made Roy’s feminist perspective complicated forever. Through the prism of her relationship with her mother, she examined her own life. Reflected in that mirror was the fragile childhood of both herself and her brother, Lalit Kumar Christopher Roy.
After ending her relationship with her alcoholic, ineffectual Bengali husband, Mary returned from Kolkata to Ooty in Tamil Nadu. The three of them, unemployed and impoverished, took shelter in a single-room ancestral home. The other half was occupied by Mary’s mother’s tenants. The room was crammed with the belongings of her grandfather, an entomologist from the British era. Three-year-old Arundhati began to grow accustomed to her mother’s cruelty. Mary’s asthma made her even more severe. Eventually, Mary’s mother and brother tried to evict them. In the Syrian Christian community, daughters had no inheritance rights. But in Tamil Nadu, they did. A lawyer’s advice saved them from eviction. Yet due to health issues and financial strain, Mary had to return to her paternal home in Kerala.
There, in Kottayam, she rented a room at the Rotary Club and started her school. Arundhati and her slightly older brother, constantly subjected to their mother’s scolding, punishment, and humiliation, became silent and withdrawn. Her brother retained some memories of their father, Rajib Roy, and the tea gardens of Assam. Arundhati, however, had no memory of her father. Mary was her entire world. She loved her mother with helpless devotion. When Mary struggled to breathe, her daughter became her lungs; she was not just her mother’s child, but her mother’s very body.
This unstable childhood planted in Roy a restlessness and a constant whisper to flee. Eventually, the opportunity came. At eighteen, she enrolled at the School of Architecture in Delhi and did not see her mother for seven years. Mary did not inquire about her daughter. Her brother couldn’t find her until he saw a reference to her article in India Today and managed to obtain her phone number. In our society, parental abuse within families is not uncommon. When a family becomes a prison disguised as shelter, escape becomes the only option. But how many children can afford that choice without support or resources?
At that stage of her life, Arundhati found refuge in a few people: Carlo, who brought stability; Sanjay, a true friend; and Pradip, with whom she formed a creative bond. Her journey into cinema began with In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, a film that marked Shah Rukh Khan’s debut. It also featured Manoj Bajpayee, Roshan Seth, and Arundhati herself in the central role. The film was a bold artistic statement. Set in the 1970s at the National Institute of Architecture in New Delhi, the story revolves around Anand Grover, known on campus as Annie, a rebellious dreamer who lands in trouble for mocking the principal, Y.D. Billimoria. The film won the National Film Award for Best Screenplay. Yet Arundhati eventually stepped away from cinema.
She also wrote the screenplay for Electric Moon, directed by her husband Pradip Krishen. It was a satirical story critiquing the romanticized and distorted perceptions Western tourists held about India. However, the final product did not align with Arundhati’s vision. That creative dissonance pushed her away from filmmaking and led her to focus entirely on writing.
Out of four years of solitude, financial hardship, and creative pressure emerged The God of Small Things. That book marked the beginning of a literary trajectory that continues to this day.
Alongside personal narratives, the memoir also touches on her activism; The beginning of which is identified with Shekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen issue. Arundhati Roy gave a powerful account of how patriarchy seeps into feminism in her recollection of watching Bandit Queen (1994).
Miss Roy’s critique was, given the time and context, a profoundly complex undertaking. At that juncture, such a task was difficult even in many developed countries. Pointing out the flaws in the work of an established personality was a powerful act of resistance in a patriarchal society. Miss Roy carried this out with remarkable conviction. Her critique was a bold gesture that flung open the doors and windows of our closed society, ushering in fresh air and new perspectives.
The film was based on Phoolan Devi’s life. The irony struck her deeply: while she sat in the cinema hall, Phoolan herself was living just minutes away, having recently returned from prison after serving her sentence. Roy was astonished that director Shekhar Kapur, who made a film about Phoolan, had not even invited her to watch it.In reality, Phoolan Devi had been gang‑raped by twenty‑two upper‑caste men, and later formed a bandit gang to avenge herself by killing them. Yet the film presented her ordeal in such a way that the woman herself seemed lost behind the repeated spectacle of violence. As Roy wrote in her sharp critique: “Over two hours it lingered vicariously on scenes of Phoolan Devi being explicitly and serially raped in various ways by various men until we almost forget who Phoolan Devi really was.”
Also her opposition to the Narmada dam project, the Gujarat pogrom, the trial of Afzal Guru, and the repression in Kashmir. Arundhati Roy has always been vocal and fearless. Her writing exposes state violence, judicial bias, and media distortion. In essays like The Greater Common Good, The End of Imagination, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, she centers the stories of marginalized people and boldly articulates her political stance.
In the Kashmir chapter, she recounts meeting a pregnant woman named Afsan, the execution of Afzal Guru, and the farcical nature of the judicial process. She reveals how ‘the collective conscience of society’ is often satisfied at the cost of truth. She also highlights the incarceration and death of G.N. Saibaba, exposing the brutality of state repression.
The memoir also includes her encounter with her father; a man she had no memories of, whom she describes as a ‘harmful rogue.’ That meeting taught her the art of befriending defeat. Through G. Isaac’s philosophy, she came to understand that surrender can also be a path to wisdom.
A final, essential point about ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’ is the recognition that it is an open text, inviting highly specific and subjective readings. While a South Asian reader may immediately grasp the nuances of the Syrian Christian community’s patriarchy and Mary Roy’s landmark legal battle, a feminist scholar might focus on the memoir as a complex case study of mother-daughter trauma, where the mother’s personal oppression tragically transforms into control over her children. For a reader with lived experience of parental estrangement, the core emotional thread might be the complex love that remains despite, and perhaps because of, the necessary act of fleeing home at eighteen. The book’s title, referencing the Virgin Mary, also suggests a layer for readers steeped in religious history, who might interpret Mary Roy as a figure of secular, formidable grace and suffering. Roy’s memoir thus performs the highest function of literature: providing a rich framework that allows different readers to construct their own profound emotional and theoretical understandings of the text based on their own identity and background.
‘Mother Mary Comes to Me 'is not merely a memoir. It is the story of a woman searching for identity, embracing defeat, and rising again with fierce grace. Its language is poetic, at times piercing, at times humorous. It offers readers a profound literary experience. In this book, Arundhati Roy shows that even amidst personal tragedy, political unrest, and social injustice, art is born.
Her ‘nomadic’ spirit, her defiant heart, and her unwavering moral compass make this book a singular document, where the personal and the political converge to form a raw, heartbreaking, and powerful narrative. The book was included in TIME's 100 Must-Read Books of 2025, due to the power of Arundhati's writing.
Book Information
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
Publisher: Scribner Canada
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1668095058
Pages : 352
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