Arundhati Roy’s new memoir about her mother Mary is a searing account of life with and without her mother.
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Arundhati Roy’s new memoir about her mother Mary is a searing account of life with and without her mother. ” data-medium-file=”https://i0.wp.com/indiacurrents.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Mary.png?fit=300%2C169&ssl=1″ data-large-file=”https://i0.wp.com/indiacurrents.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Mary.png?fit=780%2C439&ssl=1″ />
Mother Mary Comes to Me is a stark and deeply emotional portrait of intergenerational trauma and familial violence, as Arundhati Roy intimately paints her life with and without her mother.
Roy’s mother, Mary, was a formidable woman in her own right. Her biggest achievements lay not just in what she did as a woman and educator, but in what she changed. Mary Roy challenged the Travancore Christian Succession Act of 1916, which denied women in parts of Kerala equal inheritance rights, all the way to the Supreme Court, and won! With sheer grit, she founded Pallikoodam in Kottyam, Kerala, an innovative school considered one of the best in the country, renowned for its progressive curriculum with arts, music, and athletics.
My mother conducted herself with the edginess of a gangster. I watched her unleash all of herself — her genius, her eccentricity, her radical kindness, her militant courage, her ruthlessness, her generosity, her cruelty, her bullying, her head for business, and her wild, unpredictable temper — with complete abandon on our tiny, insular Syrian Christian society… I watched her make space for the whole of herself, for all her selves, in that little world.
Mary Roy, or ‘Mrs. Roy‘ as Arundhati often refers to her mother to create distance, is both a tough and broken woman. Mrs. Roy’s father was violent – he whipped his children, threw them out of his house regularly, and one time, split his wife’s scalp open with a brass vase. Mrs. Roy married the first man who proposed to her to get away from him.
The first half of Mother Mary Comes to Me is like a gut-punch. It’s relentless, raw, yet forged on an underlying innocence. What hits the reader even harder is the realization that Arundhati experienced all this mayhem as a child.
Arundhati’s father was a ‘Nothing Man‘ and an alcoholic. Mrs. Roy leaves him, taking her young children, Arundhati and her brother Lalith Kumar Christopher Roy (LKC), back to Kerala, because she cannot bear to be with her husband.
Moving back to Ayemenem, just outside Kottayam, shatters Arundhati’s childhood even further. Now she is exposed to the shame of being fatherless under the same roof as ‘decent people.’ But within months, Arundhati becomes part of the landscape – living with the river, the village, and the wilderness, going home ‘as seldom as possible.’
Arundhati Roy’s work captures the deep emotional dislocation and societal judgment that shaped her childhood, while revealing the quiet rebellion of simply surviving.
Arundhati and her brother were their mother’s only safe harbor – and she unloaded on them, unpredictably and without control. The daughter learned early how to navigate her mother’s moods, constantly gauging when the next outburst might come. Her mother’s love came with strings and tangled in emotional blackmail – “I love you Double” she would say, capitalizing on their father’s absence.
Mrs. Roy’s rage toward men, shaped by the failures of her father, husband, and brother, was redirected onto her son. She even told him once, “You’re ugly and stupid. If I were you, I’d kill myself.”
As an adult, Arundathi recognizes that to her mother, her son was “the only man she could punish for the sins of the world.” She played them off each other, always comparing, always criticizing, until there was no trust between the siblings.
Early on, in these first few chapters, Roy sets the stage for a turbulent adulthood – one shaped by the inescapable pull of intergenerational trauma. Who escapes such an inheritance without being singed?
But like all children shaped by trauma, Arundhati vacillates between hating her mother and loving her beyond reason.
Arundhati learned early that being an exceptional student was her ticket to her mother’s approval. It became her way of surviving. Her mother had once encouraged her to write everything down, even editing her work with ruthless precision. But as Arundhati’s success grew, her mother “resented the author I became.”
“I learned early that the safest place can be the most dangerous. And that even when it isn’t, I make it so.”
These prophetic lines underscore the lifelong battle Roy wages within herself – a struggle mirrored in her Booker-winning novel, The God of Small Things. That novel is also filled with characters who cannot trust peace, and who doubt happiness because they know it is fleeting,
Arundhati struggles to believe in safety and happily ever afters. Happiness feels like a trap, goodness like a setup. Because how could it ever last?
When Arundhati won the Booker Prize, the first person she called was her mother. Mrs. Roy simply said, “Well done, baby girl.” It should have been one of the happiest times of her life – a moment of recognition, financial security, and long-overdue respect. But like always, happiness and a solid, lasting relationship remained elusive, because Arundhati writes, that is, “the price I paid for being Mother Mary’s daughter.”
When Mrs. Roy died, after a long and undeniably successful life, Arundhati was inconsolable. She came undone. The daughter who had spent a lifetime resisting her mother’s control, carrying the weight of their broken relationship, was broken by her absence.
Her brother, in contrast, found a quieter way through the wreckage. Lalith Kumar Christopher Roy (LKC) grew into himself with confidence and love. He married, became a father, and poured his love into his child. While Arundhati carried her mother’s fire, LKC found peace and a way to live despite the past; Arundhati built her life because of it.
The book tackles the great mystery of Arundhati’s life – her love for her mother.
“If I could understand myself better, I’d probably understand a lot more about the world and certainly about my country, in which so many people seem to revere their persecutors and appear grateful to be subjugated.”
This inner conflict led to an everlasting fight against the world, both personal and outwardly, as she fiercely advocated for the marginalized, championing causes such as Kashmiri independence, Maoist rebels, environmental movements like the Narmada project, and nuclear disarmament.
These battles brought out the best of her mother in Arundhati; not her cruelty, but her strength in her unwillingness to be silenced and the need to speak for those who couldn’t.
Arundhati ran away from home at sixteen to Delhi. That was her making. She ran because she was an ‘address-illathu pillaru‘ – a child without an address, without a proper family name, and without a place to which she truly belonged. Some might say Arundhati has been running ever since. Even when she finds moments of solace in work or in relationships, they feel temporary and dangerous at best.
Mother Mary Comes to Me is the origin story of one of India’s most polarizing authors – a woman shaped and often torn by the painful contradictions in her life. It’s the story of someone caught between a progressive education and an insular, patriarchal family structure; between the wealth and recognition of her extraordinary success, the wounds of a childhood marked by violence, control, and emotional isolation, her fierce independence, and her lifelong need for her mother’s love and approval.
Perhaps in telling this story, Arundhati is not just looking back but finally laying something to rest. Maybe now, with Mrs. Roy gone, she will finally find a kind of peace within herself.
This content is intended only for mature audiences. Reader discretion advised.
CW/TW: domestic violence, language, mental health, mental illness, depression, su*c*de, violent imagery, body image, anger, anxiety, abandonment
Mother Mary Comes To Me
Scribner in the U.S., Hamish Hamilton in the UK, and Penguin Random House India
September 2, 2025 by Scribner
ISBN 9781668094716 (ISBN10: 1668094711)ASIN 1668094711
English/224 pages, Hardcover
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