A deep review of Arundhati Roy’s memoir ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’, exploring her relationship with Mary Roy, memory, grief and a daughter’s emotional journey
Bhaskar Parichha
Book Name: Mother Mary Comes to Me
Author: Arundhati Roy
Publisher: Penguin Random House India
Place of Publication: Gurugram
Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me marks a turning point in her writing career. After decades of producing fiction and essays that took on the world — its politics, wars, inequalities, and injustices — Roy turns inward. This is her first memoir, and it is also her most intimate work. In these pages, she writes not about nations or revolutions, but about one woman who shaped her world more than anyone else: her mother, Mary Roy.
Mary Roy was an extraordinary figure in her own right. She was a teacher, an educationist, and a fierce advocate for women’s rights in Kerala. She fought a historic legal battle in the 1980s that changed the inheritance laws for Christian women in India, ensuring daughters could claim equal property rights. But to Arundhati, before all of that, she was simply “Amma” — brilliant, demanding, unpredictable, and full of contradictions. Roy calls her “my shelter and my storm,” a phrase that captures the deep ambivalence of love and struggle that runs through the book.
The memoir traces Arundhati’s childhood in Aymanam, the small Kerala village that would later become the backdrop for The God of Small Things. It was a childhood marked by both freedom and tension. Mary Roy ran an experimental school — the Corpus Christi School in Kottayam — where she introduced new ideas of education and discipline. Yet at home, the young Arundhati grew up in a house charged with her mother’s intensity — her fierce temper, her towering sense of independence, and her refusal to compromise with convention.
As Roy grows older in the story, the narrative follows her to Delhi, to architecture school, and later to her life as a writer and activist. Through it all, the figure of Mary Roy looms large, sometimes as a guiding light, sometimes as a shadow. The memoir doesn’t romanticize this relationship; it confronts it with honesty and humor. Arundhati admits that she had to leave home at 18 — not because she didn’t love her mother, but because she wanted to preserve that love by creating distance. “I left,” she writes, “so I could continue to love her.”
This act of leaving becomes a recurring metaphor in the book — for independence, for self-preservation, and for the painful necessity of becoming one’s own person. Roy writes with disarming candor about how her mother’s strength could be both empowering and overwhelming. There are moments of deep affection and laughter, but also of hurt, misunderstanding, and silence. Through these, Roy pieces together not just her mother’s story but also her own — the making of a writer who learned to see the world through the prism of love and resistance.
Mother Mary Comes to Me is not only a daughter’s portrait of her mother but also a meditation on memory itself. Roy reflects on how our recollections change over time, how they soften or harden depending on where we stand. The narrative moves between past and present, between Kerala and Delhi, between grief and gratitude. After her mother’s death, Roy finds herself looking back at all that they shared and all that remained unsaid — trying to make sense of a bond that was never simple but always profound.
Written in the luminous, lyrical prose that has always been Roy’s signature, the memoir is filled with scenes that are vivid and cinematic: the smell of rain in Kerala, the sound of her mother’s voice echoing through the corridors of the school, the quiet defiance of a woman who refused to be ordinary. It is a book about family, freedom, and forgiveness — about how we carry our parents within us long after they are gone.
For readers familiar with The God of Small Things, Mother Mary Comes to Me feels like the story behind the story — the real life that inspired the fiction. But even for those coming to Roy for the first time, it stands alone as a powerful testament to the complexity of love. It reminds us that mothers and daughters can be each other’s greatest teachers, critics, and companions — bound together by affection, frustration, and the unspoken knowledge that, despite everything, they remain inseparable.
In the end, Roy’s memoir is less about reconciliation than recognition. She doesn’t seek to tidy up the messiness of family life; she embraces it. Through her words, we see that every relationship — especially the one between mother and daughter — contains within it both devotion and rebellion, tenderness and rage. Mother Mary Comes to Me is a moving, beautifully written act of remembrance — a daughter’s song for her mother, full of pain, love, and luminous truth.
(The author is a senior journalist and columnist. Views expressed are personal.)
