Arundhati Roy, Difficult Mothers and the Book I Loved Most

I should probably admit something before we go any further: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy was, without question, my favourite book on the Independent Bookshops Non-Fiction shortlist.

Not the neatest. Not the easiest. Not the one I agreed with most consistently. Certainly not the one that behaved itself politely in the corner and waited to be admired.

But my favourite.

I should also admit that I have had a crush on Arundhati Roy for years. Not a sensible crush. Not a measured, intellectual “I admire her contribution to letters” sort of crush, though obviously I do. More the kind of crush one has on writers who seem to arrive fully armed: beautiful sentences, dangerous opinions, no apparent interest in being liked by the correct people.

This is not to say I agree with her on everything. I don’t.

In fact, I probably agree with her less than I did when I was younger, more certain, more romantically inclined towards uncompromising moral clarity. Age does things to a person. You start out wanting revolution, justice, purity, courage and the glorious destruction of hypocrisy. Then one day you find yourself muttering things like, “Well, compromise is not always cowardice,” while buying dishwasher tablets and wondering if anyone has emptied the bins.

I value compromise more now. I value institutions, however maddening. I value the difficult, unglamorous work of holding things together. I am more suspicious than I used to be of positions that divide the world too cleanly into the pure and the corrupt, the innocent and the guilty, the oppressed and the oppressor, even when those categories are often brutally, painfully real.

So yes, Arundhati Roy can be difficult. Contentious. Exasperating. Magnificent. Sometimes all in the same paragraph.

And bloody hell, she can write.

That is the first thing to say about Mother Mary Comes to Me. Before the politics, before the biography, before the arguments one might have with Roy or about Roy, before the long history of public controversy, there is the writing.

This book is alive at sentence level.

It is funny, furious, wounded, unsentimental, lush, precise, theatrical and strange. It has the quality of someone opening a locked room and discovering not dust but weather. Roy writes as though memory is not an archive but a monsoon: flooding, fragrant, dangerous, full of things you thought had been put away.

Written after the death of her mother, Mary Roy, in September 2022, this is Roy’s first memoir. Mary was not merely Arundhati Roy’s mother, which would already have been enough material for several lifetimes. She was an educator, activist, legal fighter and formidable force in her own right. In 1986, Mary Roy won a landmark Supreme Court case that helped secure equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women in Kerala. That is the kind of sentence one can say quickly, but should not. It means she changed the law. It means she challenged the structures that had been designed to keep women dependent, disinherited and obedient. It means she was, in public terms, heroic.

In private terms, she was much more complicated.

And then the book catches fire.

Mary Roy emerges from these pages not as a sainted mother, not as a monster, not as the noble feminist ancestor to be garlanded and safely framed, but as one of the most astonishing maternal figures in recent memoir. Brilliant, cruel, charismatic, volatile, visionary, funny, controlling, brave, impossible. Roy calls her mother both shelter and storm, and the phrase is not decorative. It is the whole book.

Mary founds a school. Mary fights the law. Mary transforms lives. Mary rages. Mary humiliates. Mary loves. Mary terrifies. Mary builds. Mary destroys. Mary teaches her daughter what power looks like long before that daughter turns her attention to empires, dams, governments, armies and corporations.

The memoir’s great achievement is that it refuses to separate the mother from the world.

A lesser book would have said: here is my difficult childhood, and then here is my public life. First trauma, then politics. First mother, then India. First family, then history.

Roy knows better. In her life, these things are not separate. They are fused.

The female body, the law, inheritance, shame, punishment, permission, exile, speech, dissent: all of it begins at home. All of it begins in the family. All of it begins with a mother who has been denied her own rights and then becomes, for her daughter, both liberator and jailer.

The memoir is not linear in the usual obedient way. It moves through childhood in Kerala, Syrian Christian family life, Delhi, architecture school, film, poverty, desire, abortion, marriage, writing, the astonishing success of The God of Small Things, and the decades of political activism that followed. It loops, doubles back, remembers and corrects itself. It understands that memory does not queue politely.

This may frustrate readers who like their memoirs cleanly stacked: childhood, formative years, success, reckoning, wisdom, tasteful epiphany. Roy is not offering that. She is not in the business of tasteful epiphany. She gives us something stranger and more truthful: a life in which the past keeps leaking into the present and the present keeps rearranging the past.

It is also, despite the intensity of its material, unexpectedly funny.

That matters. There is very little self-pity here. Almost none. Which is remarkable, given that the material would have allowed for great vats of it. Roy could have written a misery memoir. She does not. She writes instead with bite, rhythm and a kind of wicked amusement at the absurdity of survival.

There are passages about Mary so sharp they feel almost dangerous to touch. There are chapter titles that practically deserve their own standing ovation. There are moments where the comedy is so dark it stops being comedy and becomes oxygen.

That refusal of self-pity is part of what makes the book so bracing. Roy is not asking to be soothed. She is not presenting injury as identity. She is not turning pain into lifestyle branding. She is trying to understand how a person is made, and what it costs to remain alive to the world after being made that way.

For readers who know Roy primarily as the author of The God of Small Things, this memoir offers a fascinating return to the source. Her Booker Prize-winning novel did not emerge from nowhere, and Mother Mary Comes to Me quietly, and sometimes explicitly, shows the soup from which it came: Kerala, family, twins, shame, forbidden love, caste, inheritance, cruelty, tenderness, weather, language, the old violence of respectability.

Roy became internationally famous in 1997 when The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize. She could, at that point, have become a more comfortable kind of literary celebrity. The world would have allowed it. The world would probably have preferred it. It likes its beautiful, brilliant novelists to remain decorative, grateful and available for festivals.

Roy did something else.

She became one of India’s most prominent dissenting public writers. She wrote against nuclear nationalism. She wrote about Kashmir, the Narmada dam, Maoist insurgents, caste, capitalism, Hindu nationalism, state violence and corporate power. She became, depending on who you ask, a moral giant, a necessary witness, an infuriating absolutist, a dangerous radical, or the kind of so-called “anti-national” nuisance governments tend not to enjoy.

This is where my own feelings about her become complicated.

I admire her courage enormously. I admire the fact that she used the fame from one of the most celebrated novels of the late twentieth century not to become cosy, but to become troublesome. There is something thrilling about that. There is also something costly about it. Roy has faced legal threats, prosecution, contempt proceedings, public vilification and the long grinding hostility reserved for women who refuse to soften their voices.

But I do not always follow her all the way.

There are times when her moral clarity, which is one of her great gifts, becomes, for me, too complete. Too sealed. Too uninterested in the grey zones where most political life actually has to be lived. Some of her critics from within the Indian intellectual left have argued that she can underplay complexity, especially when writing about dams, development, capitalism or insurgency. I do not think those criticisms can be dismissed simply as bad faith or establishment discomfort.

Sometimes Roy’s certainty is exhilarating. Sometimes it is narrowing.

This memoir does not entirely solve that problem. In places, the political sections feel compressed. Kashmir, the Narmada movement, state violence, the Naxalites, Indian nationalism: these are vast subjects, and occasionally the book restates positions rather than fully testing them. Roy is not writing a defence brief, and memoir is not required to stage every counter-argument. Still, readers who have wrestled with her politics before will find the old difficulty here too.

But that difficulty is part of the point.

Roy without politics would be false. To wish this book were less political is, I think, to wish Arundhati Roy were someone else. And she has spent a lifetime declining that invitation.

The deeper truth of Mother Mary Comes to Me is that the politics and the mother cannot be separated. Mary Roy’s own body was subject to law, inheritance, social control, religious expectation and patriarchal contempt. Her asthma, in Roy’s telling, is both real illness and part of the family’s emotional weather: a source of fear, control, dependence and drama. Her rage is personal, but it is also historical. Her daughter’s politics, for all their global reach, keep circling the same question: who is allowed to live freely in their own body, their own land, their own language, their own life?

That is why the most intimate sections of the book are also the most political.

Roy writes about desire with startling candour. She writes about abortion without melodrama and without the usual machinery of shame. She writes about the female body as a place where family, religion, medicine, law and power all converge. These passages are among the strongest in the book because they show something Roy’s polemical writing can sometimes obscure: the body beneath the argument. The girl, the woman, the daughter, the lover, the patient, the runaway, the writer.

The book is also a profound study of leaving.

Roy left her mother. She had to. One of the most devastating emotional truths in the memoir is that sometimes leaving is not the opposite of love. Sometimes leaving is the condition that makes love survivable. Some mothers can only be loved from a distance. Some homes have to be fled before they can be remembered. Some daughters have to become fugitives in order not to become casualties.

That, I think, is why this book affected me so much.

It is not sentimental about motherhood. Thank God. We have quite enough sentimental writing about motherhood, much of it apparently designed to make everyone involved feel either saintly or guilty. Roy gives us something better: a mother-daughter relationship as weather system, battlefield, inheritance case, comedy routine, haunting and declaration of love.

Mary Roy is impossible. Arundhati Roy, gloriously, appears to have inherited the trait. The book is, in some ways, about two impossible women trying to survive each other.

And yet the final movement is not bitterness. Nor is it forgiveness in the soft, scented-candle sense of the word. It is something harder. A reckoning. A recognition. An understanding that love does not require simplification. You can love someone and tell the truth about them. You can be shaped by someone and still need to escape them. You can inherit both courage and damage. You can be grateful and furious. You can say, this woman made me possible, and this woman nearly made me impossible.

If this is love, it is the grown-up kind: unsweetened, unpretty and expensive. Not tidy. Not the kind that fits neatly on a Mother’s Day card beside a bunch of tulips and a lie.

There is a phrase in the notes I made while reading: “the darkness is intimate.” That still feels right. Roy has written about darkness before: the darkness of states, borders, caste, militarism, capitalism, nationalism, power. Here she lets us see the darkness at home. The darkness in the room. The darkness at the table. The darkness that teaches a child how to read danger before she has language for it.

And then, somehow, she makes art from it.

That is the astonishing thing.

This is not a perfect memoir. The early childhood sections can feel slightly held back, as though Roy is still deciding how close she can bear to stand to the material. Some of the political sections are more asserted than explored. Some readers may want more mother and less public life; others may want the politics more fully defended.

But I would take this kind of unevenness over a hundred polished little memoirs that have nothing at stake.

Mother Mary Comes to Me has everything at stake: family, law, nation, literature, memory, dissent, the body, the mother, the daughter, the self. Roy turns her gaze inward without becoming smaller. Many public writers, when they write memoir, either inflate the private life into legend or shrink the public life into anecdote. Roy does neither. She lets the two contaminate each other, which is to say she tells the truth.

I finished it feeling annoyed, moved, dazzled, provoked and slightly bereft, which is frankly the ideal state in which to finish a book. I do not want books merely to confirm me. I want them to trouble me intelligently. I want them to be difficult in ways that earn the difficulty. I want to argue with them and then recommend them passionately to strangers.

That is what bookshops are for.

Not just handing people the books they already know they want, but saying: here, try this. It may not behave. It may not flatter your certainties. It may make you uncomfortable. It may make you remember your own mother, which is frankly reckless and should come with a warning sticker. It may make you think about law, inheritance, daughters, bodies, nations, exile, language and the price of becoming yourself.

So yes, this was my favourite of the Independent Bookshops Non-Fiction shortlist.

Not because it is the easiest book to love. It is not.

Because it is difficult, dazzling, uneven, brave, funny, intimate, political and alive. Because Mary Roy comes off the page like a storm with a school attached. Because Arundhati Roy remains one of the most thrilling and infuriating writers alive.

And because I still have a crush, apparently, though a more middle-aged and compromise-valuing one now. A crush with caveats. A crush with footnotes. A crush that occasionally pauses to say, “I’m not sure I agree with that,” before underlining the next sentence because bloody hell.

Sometimes the best book on a shortlist is not the one that behaves best. Sometimes it is the one that leaves you feeling as though something has been cracked open.

Mother Mary Comes to Me is available now in Hardback at Chapters.

Pre-order  Mother Mary Comes to Me paperback released June 11th 2026