Arundhati Roy’s ‘Mother Mary’: A daughter’s reckoning with her shelter and her storm

In Mother Mary Comes to Me (September 2025), Arundhati Roy turns her luminous, defiant prose inward for the first time. Known for The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness — novels that married intimacy to insurgency — Roy’s new work is her first memoir, and perhaps her most searing. It is not a serene recollection of a celebrated life but a tempestuous dialogue with her late mother, Mary Roy, the indomitable woman she calls ‘my shelter and my storm’.

Finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the 300-page memoir resists the conventions of the genre. It unfolds as a long, unfinished conversation between mother and daughter — one that swells with grief, humour, rebellion and paradox. The book begins with death: Mary Roy’s passing in September 2022. A ‘heartsmashed’ Arundhati confesses her bewilderment at the ferocity of her mourning. Writing becomes her only refuge, a way to live inside grief without softening its edges.

Mary Roy’s life was a study in defiance. Born into Kerala’s conservative Syrian Christian community, she rejected the expectations that confined women to silence and dependence. She fled an abusive marriage to a Bengali tea planter — ‘a Nothing Man’ — and built a new life with her two young children, Arundhati and her brother Lalith. Disinherited by her family, she fought back through the courts, culminating in the landmark 1986 Supreme Court judgment that secured equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women.

She was also an educator of rare vision. Founding the Corpus Christi School in Aymanam, Mary created a space of rigour, creativity and rebellion. Yet the same passion that made her a public icon rendered her a volatile presence at home. She was imperious, quarrelsome, dazzling and impossible — her moods bruising those she most loved. ‘In my effort to fathom my mother,’ Roy writes, ‘I turned into a maze.’

The memoir’s great triumph lies in its refusal to sanctify. Mary is neither saint, nor monster; but a woman whose contradictions defined her vitality. Her rages are not pathologies, but expressions of life at its fullest pitch — a refusal to submit to convention, even at the cost of peace.

Roy’s early years unspool across precarious landscapes — first in Tamil Nadu, then in Kerala’s Aymanam (immortalised in The God of Small Things). But where the novel transformed memory into myth, the memoir reclaims it with raw precision.

Love in the Roy household was never simple. Mary’s affection was entwined with antagonism, tenderness shadowed by terror. Arundhati recounts with startling candour the lice combed from her hair that she ‘loved killing’; the constant testing of loyalty and endurance.

Her brother, she notes wryly, ‘remembered being loved. Fortunately, I didn’t.’ That devastating adverb — fortunately — captures the book’s paradoxical grace: that absence, too, can be a kind of freedom.

Mary offered her children no stability, but something fiercer — the hunger to be free. Her volatility became her daughter’s apprenticeship in resilience. From that crucible emerged not sentimentality, but a creative and political ferocity that would define Arundhati’s life.

At 18, Arundhati fled Kerala for Delhi to study architecture. It was, she insists, not abandonment but survival: ‘I ran from her not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.’

That paradox of distance as preservation runs through the book.

In Delhi’s experimental bohemia, Arundhati encountered a world unbound by her mother’s tempest. One of the memoir’s most moving scenes recounts her reunion with her estranged father, Micky Roy, in a hotel room: ‘He was lying on his stomach with his knees bent, his feet waving at the ceiling.’ It is a moment at once comic, tragic and tender — a miniature of Roy’s gift for fusing absurdity and sorrow in a single breath.

Yet even in escape, Mary remained her magnetic opposite.

Her mother had fought family and patriarchy; Roy would come to fight the state, the market and empire itself. The daughter’s activism — her opposition to nuclear weapons, her protests against dams and displacement — feels instinctive, the continuation of an inherited rebellion.

In Mother Mary Comes to Me, politics seeps in as atmosphere. The memoir traces how the struggles of one defiant woman became the emotional blueprint for a daughter’s dissent. The battles shift — from home to nation, from family tyranny to state power — but the pulse remains the same: a refusal to submit.

‘The nation-state isn’t India, and it doesn’t love me back,’ Roy observes. It is a line that echoes her mother’s fraught affection: the impossibility of unconditional belonging, whether in family or country. Both women love through argument, through resistance.

Mary’s legal victories and domestic storms mirrored the contradictions of a nation in flux — from the idealisms of the post- Independence generation to the disillusions of globalisation. The personal and the political converge, revealing how the architecture of rebellion is laid first in the home.

Stylistically, the memoir bears Roy’s unmistakable signature: lyrical, fragmentary, fearless. Her sentences veer between lush cadences and stark economy, holding contradiction as the only truth worth telling. The structure mirrors memory itself — broken, recursive, unfinished.

There is humour amid heartbreak, wit amid rage. She turns cruelty into insight, sorrow into irony, contradiction into art. The memoir’s rhythm alternates between elegy and explosion, prose and prayer. ‘Love,’ Roy seems to say, ‘is not the absence of pain but its transformation.’

The Beatles-inspired title may suggest comfort, but the book resists such serenity. Roy’s invocation of ‘Mother Mary’ is not a plea for salvation but a conversation with the dead, a continuation of argument beyond the grave.

For Roy, grief is inseparable from rebellion. Her mother’s ferocity — her refusal to conform, her willingness to break and be broken — becomes both wound and weapon. Mary’s love was thorny, savage and salvific. To honour her, the daughter must embrace those paradoxes.

‘Heart-smashed’ by loss, Roy does not seek closure. Instead, she inhabits the rawness, turning it into art. The memoir’s beauty lies in its acceptance of irresolution. It offers no tidy healing, no moral of reconciliation. Instead, it celebrates the unfinishedness of love itself.

Mother Mary Comes to Me is a daughter’s testament to contradiction as a form of truth. Fierce, restless and incandescent, it expands the boundaries of memoir into something closer to confession, elegy, and political meditation all at once.

Roy has written not about sainthood but about the strange, radiant grace of imperfection. In refusing to simplify her mother — or herself — she reclaims complexity as freedom. This is Arundhati Roy at her most vulnerable and her most defiant: chronicling how love, even when unbearable, remains the deepest act of rebellion.

Title Mother Mary Comes to Me

Author Arundhati Roy

Publisher Penguin Hamish Hamilton

Pages 376

Price Rs 899 (hardcover)

Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai