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Mother Mary Comes To Me
by Arundhati Roy (Author)
Chapters
- Gangster15:07
- Fugitives13:27
- The Cosmopolitans10:21
- ‘I Love You Double’08:05
- The Sliding-Folding School08:55
- Federico Fellini and the Kottayam Santa14:11
- Collateral09:33
- The Naxalites12:48
- I’m All for the Unconquered Moon03:15
- Laurie Baker and the Bald Hill17:19
- Joe, Jimi, Janis and Jesus10:41
- ‘How’s That Crazy Mother of Yours?’21:28
- ‘You’re a Millstone Around My Neck’19:18
- ‘Doesn’t She Sound Like That Person in The Exorcist ?’19:32
- In Which Jesus Marries a Japanese Parcel14:54
- Cake Walkin’ Baby13:13
- In the Shade of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya10:14
- ‘What’s So Funny?’19:45
- They’re Gonna Put Me in the Movies16:14
- ‘Have You Ever Considered Becoming a Writer?’21:05
- Mama Bear, Papa Bear41:00
- The Exquisite Art of Failure14:02
- Flying Rhinos and the Banyan Tree18:28
- In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones14:38
- Blasphemy10:16
- ‘You Are Not Showing India in a Proper Light’10:26
- The Band Breaks Up11:36
- The Great Indian Rape-Trick12:50
- The God of Small Things40:27
- Things Fall Apart15:11
- Mobile Republic07:24
- Rally for the Valley25:06
- More Trouble with the Law17:11
- Jailbird17:41
- My Seditious Heart11:26
- A Home of My Own05:05
- Utmost Happiness07:12
- Madam Houdini and the Nothing Man44:26
- Walking with the Comrades29:10
- ‘Her Birth Certificate Was an Apology from God’11:11
- Retreat13:17
- A Declaration of Love28:59
Closing Credits01:01
===In her memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy presents a candid and complex portrait of her relationship with her formidable mother, Mary Roy. The book is a poignant reflection on her life, sparked by the death of her mother in 2022. Roy recounts how her mother, a single parent in a conservative society, was both a "shelter" and a "storm," a revolutionary figure who fought for women's rights and education, but whose volatile nature and unconventional parenting shaped Roy's life in profound and often difficult ways.
The memoir traces Roy's journey from a childhood in Kerala marked by her mother's fierce independence and at times, "brutal journalistic brevity" in her interactions, to her own path as a writer and political activist. The narrative seamlessly weaves together the personal and the political, showing how her mother's battles—including a landmark legal case to secure inheritance rights for Christian women—influenced her own critical and rebellious spirit.
Roy's writing is characterized by the same lyrical prose and sharp political clarity found in her celebrated novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. However, in this memoir, she adds a new layer of raw, personal honesty. She explores the paradoxes of her love for her mother, acknowledging the cruelty she endured while also crediting her mother with fostering the independence and strength that allowed her to become the person and the writer she is today.
Ultimately, Mother Mary Comes to Me is not just a memoir of a mother-daughter relationship, but an ode to freedom, a tribute to the "thorny love" that shapes us, and a testament to the enduring legacies of two extraordinary women.
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4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars (8)
The incredible first memoir from the Booker-winning radical icon Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, this is a soaring account, both intimate and inspiring, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as ‘my shelter and my storm’.
Distraught and even a “little ashamed” at the intensity of her response to the death of the mother she ran from at age eighteen, Arundhati began to write Mother Mary Comes to Me. The result is this astonishing, disconcerting, surprisingly funny chronicle—unique and simultaneously universal, of the author’s life, from childhood to the present, from Kerala to Delhi.
With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.
377 pages
Product description
About the Author
Arundhati Roy is the author of the novels The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017. She is the author of various works of non-fiction including My Seditious Heart, Azadi and, most recently, The Architecture of Modern Empire. --This text refers to the paperback edition.
Review
A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2025
"Booker Prize-winning Indian novelist Arundhati Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother...Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love. An intimate, stirring chronicle."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Praise for Arundhati Roy
"The world has never had to face such global confusion. Only in facing it can we make sense of what we have to do. And this is precisely what Arundhati Roy does. She makes sense of what we have to do. Thereby offering an example. An example of what? Of being fully alive in our world, such as it is, and of getting close to and listening to those for whom this world has become intolerable."
--John Berger
"Arundhati Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time."
--Naomi Klein
"Arundhati Roy calls for 'factual precision' alongside of the 'real precision of poetry.' Remarkably, she combines those achievements to a degree that few can hope to approach."
--Noam Chomsky
"Arundhati Roy combines her brilliant style as a novelist with her powerful commitment to social justice in producing these eloquent, penetrating essays."
--Howard Zinn
"Arundhati Roy is one of the few great revolutionary intellectuals in our time ... courageous, visionary, and erudite."
--Cornel West
"Her incomparable divining rod picks up the cries of the despised and the oppressed in the most remote corners of the globe; it even picks up the cries of rivers and fish. With an unfailing charm and wit that makes her writing constantly enlivening to read, her analysis of our grotesque world is savagely clear, and yet her anger never obscures her awareness that beauty, joy, and pleasure can potentially be part of the life of human beings."
--Wallace Shawn
"[Roy is] an electrifying political essayist. . . . So fluent is her prose, so keen her understanding of global politics, and so resonant her objections to nuclear weapons ... that her essays are as uplifting as they are galvanizing."
--Booklist
"The scale of what Roy surveys is staggering. Her pointed indictment is devastating."
--New York Times Book Review --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Publication date : 4 September 2025
Print length : 377 pages
Customer Reviews:
4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars (8)
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/books/review/arundhati-roy-mother-mary-comes-to-me.html
Arundhati Roy with her brother and mother in 1963, standing front of their house in Ooty, India.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/books/review/arundhati-roy-mother-mary-comes-to-me.html
Arundhati Roy with her brother and mother in 1963, standing front of their house in Ooty, India.Credit...via Arundhati Roy
She Raged. She Terrified. And She Shaped Arundhati Roy.
The prizewinning novelist’s unsparing memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” captures the eventful life and times of her mother, a driven educator and imperfect inspiration.
By Alexandra JacobsPublished Sept. 2, 2025Updated Sept. 3, 2025
===
MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME, by Arundhati Roy
To the long, sonorous roll call of difficult mothers in literature — Mrs. Bennet; Joan Crawford; Rose Hovick; heck, Medea — now add Mary Roy. Mrs. Roy to you. And most tellingly, to her own daughter.
That daughter is Arundhati Roy: the Indian author and activist who burst onto the best-seller list in 1997, and won a Booker Prize at 36, for her first novel, “The God of Small Things,” the luminous story of a beleaguered family. Her more politically inflected second, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” was published 20 years later, after many books of nonfiction.
Let’s hope Roy’s new memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” is not the capstone of this unconventional career (she studied architecture, and also wrote and acted in films), but it is certainly a keystone: sturdy and polished in its depiction of a foundational monstrosity.
Though she lacked material riches, the majestically named Mary Roy rises from these pages as an imperious and volatile parent, a “gangster” akin to that notorious television Roy, Logan of “Succession”: hurling crockery, slinging insults and beating her son, Lalith, for an average report card, with a wooden ruler until it broke. He grew up to thrive as an extroverted seafood tycoon, but to this day his sister, praised for her superior grades, finds the cloak of celebrity a bit itchy.
“On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room,” she writes, and — nodding at her well-established social conscience — “if you pause to think about it, it’s true, someone is.”
Mrs. Roy died in 2022 at 88; afflicted with terrible asthma, she was in later years followed always by a “frightened minion carrying her asthma inhaler, as though it were a crown, or a scepter of some sort.” She didn’t just forbid wire hangers; she told Arundhati (born Susanna) that she’d tried to abort her with one. And after that didn’t work, she wished she’d dumped her offspring, “a millstone around her neck,” in an orphanage.
“Get out!” was a frequent edict, from home or car. “You bitch,” Mary exclaimed after Susanna, aged 9, accidentally hung up their new Bakelite telephone during a conversation.
Four years later, the child came home from a military boarding school to find her beloved Alsatian, Dido, named for the Queen of Carthage in the Christopher Marlowe play, shot dead. The crime: mating with a street dog.
Image
Let’s get to this complicated character’s good points. Her Waystar Royco was Pallikoodam, the renowned school she started in a former Rotary Club in Kottayam in 1967. She collaborated with a Christian missionary, who quickly departed after the arrival of teachers of Bharatanatyam, a form of Indian classical dance (“heathen, unchristian and unacceptable,” the missionary huffed). Mary’s intellect was wide-roving and generous: telling her daughter about world conflicts, reading her Rudyard Kipling and singing “Ol’ Man River.”
Having rebuilt a new facility for the school on three acres of wilderness, she would eventually persuade her country’s Supreme Court to overturn a judgment against students performing the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar.” She had already successfully petitioned against a statute denying daughters the rights to their father’s property.
The patriarchy failed Mary. Her own father, a natty entomologist for the imperial government, had also been violent, once splitting the scalp of his wife, an accomplished violinist, with a brass vase, and smashing her instrument. Mary’s brother, G. Isaac, was a Rhodes scholar who started a pickle factory; his taste for younger women inspired Mary to call him Humbert Humbert.
She married the first man she could to flee this family of origin, and he turned out to be an absentee alcoholic, so she divorced him but kept the surname. Micky Roy was the son of a boxer, whose feckless charm, when he turns up, has a dash of Johnny Nolan, the singing waiter in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”
These relatives and their dynamics are depicted with extraordinary precision, all the way to the Rabelaisian grotesqueries of eldercare, her mother deploying a call bell along with her Christian Dior sunglasses. So is Arundhati’s inevitable leave-taking, refashioning herself with the help of Janis Joplin and the Beatles (note the book’s title), while “literally living on air.”
Inspiration means breath, which for Mary Roy was always labored. Her daughter compares the process of writing “The God of Small Things,” which had some autobiographical elements, to “sculpting smoke.” But her descriptions of public advocacy — against nuclear tests, dams, gang rape — arrive here more like dust storms: urgent, impressive events that disrupt the microclimate of this book.
Money and its morality are constant considerations in “Mother Mary Comes to Me.” After a childhood of abuse and material deprivation, Roy is rolling in dough, setting up a charitable trust to deal with the excess, “my crazy royalties.”
Checking her dad into a rehab center: “Thang god for royalties.” Her beautiful apartment in Delhi: “My royalty home, bought wholly with the proceeds of literature. A dangerous place of my own. One from which nobody can order me to get out. Every now and then I kiss the walls and raise a glass and a middle finger to my critics, who seem to think that to write and say the things I do I must live a life of fake, self-inflicted poverty.”
You can see Mary in that middle finger. but she also put the Roy in “royalty.”
MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME | By Arundhati Roy | Scribner | 352 pp. | $30
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
===
===
===
She Raged. She Terrified. And She Shaped Arundhati Roy.
The prizewinning novelist’s unsparing memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” captures the eventful life and times of her mother, a driven educator and imperfect inspiration.
By Alexandra JacobsPublished Sept. 2, 2025Updated Sept. 3, 2025
===
MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME, by Arundhati Roy
To the long, sonorous roll call of difficult mothers in literature — Mrs. Bennet; Joan Crawford; Rose Hovick; heck, Medea — now add Mary Roy. Mrs. Roy to you. And most tellingly, to her own daughter.
That daughter is Arundhati Roy: the Indian author and activist who burst onto the best-seller list in 1997, and won a Booker Prize at 36, for her first novel, “The God of Small Things,” the luminous story of a beleaguered family. Her more politically inflected second, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” was published 20 years later, after many books of nonfiction.
Let’s hope Roy’s new memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” is not the capstone of this unconventional career (she studied architecture, and also wrote and acted in films), but it is certainly a keystone: sturdy and polished in its depiction of a foundational monstrosity.
Though she lacked material riches, the majestically named Mary Roy rises from these pages as an imperious and volatile parent, a “gangster” akin to that notorious television Roy, Logan of “Succession”: hurling crockery, slinging insults and beating her son, Lalith, for an average report card, with a wooden ruler until it broke. He grew up to thrive as an extroverted seafood tycoon, but to this day his sister, praised for her superior grades, finds the cloak of celebrity a bit itchy.
“On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room,” she writes, and — nodding at her well-established social conscience — “if you pause to think about it, it’s true, someone is.”
Mrs. Roy died in 2022 at 88; afflicted with terrible asthma, she was in later years followed always by a “frightened minion carrying her asthma inhaler, as though it were a crown, or a scepter of some sort.” She didn’t just forbid wire hangers; she told Arundhati (born Susanna) that she’d tried to abort her with one. And after that didn’t work, she wished she’d dumped her offspring, “a millstone around her neck,” in an orphanage.
“Get out!” was a frequent edict, from home or car. “You bitch,” Mary exclaimed after Susanna, aged 9, accidentally hung up their new Bakelite telephone during a conversation.
Four years later, the child came home from a military boarding school to find her beloved Alsatian, Dido, named for the Queen of Carthage in the Christopher Marlowe play, shot dead. The crime: mating with a street dog.
Image
Let’s get to this complicated character’s good points. Her Waystar Royco was Pallikoodam, the renowned school she started in a former Rotary Club in Kottayam in 1967. She collaborated with a Christian missionary, who quickly departed after the arrival of teachers of Bharatanatyam, a form of Indian classical dance (“heathen, unchristian and unacceptable,” the missionary huffed). Mary’s intellect was wide-roving and generous: telling her daughter about world conflicts, reading her Rudyard Kipling and singing “Ol’ Man River.”
Having rebuilt a new facility for the school on three acres of wilderness, she would eventually persuade her country’s Supreme Court to overturn a judgment against students performing the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar.” She had already successfully petitioned against a statute denying daughters the rights to their father’s property.
The patriarchy failed Mary. Her own father, a natty entomologist for the imperial government, had also been violent, once splitting the scalp of his wife, an accomplished violinist, with a brass vase, and smashing her instrument. Mary’s brother, G. Isaac, was a Rhodes scholar who started a pickle factory; his taste for younger women inspired Mary to call him Humbert Humbert.
She married the first man she could to flee this family of origin, and he turned out to be an absentee alcoholic, so she divorced him but kept the surname. Micky Roy was the son of a boxer, whose feckless charm, when he turns up, has a dash of Johnny Nolan, the singing waiter in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”
These relatives and their dynamics are depicted with extraordinary precision, all the way to the Rabelaisian grotesqueries of eldercare, her mother deploying a call bell along with her Christian Dior sunglasses. So is Arundhati’s inevitable leave-taking, refashioning herself with the help of Janis Joplin and the Beatles (note the book’s title), while “literally living on air.”
Inspiration means breath, which for Mary Roy was always labored. Her daughter compares the process of writing “The God of Small Things,” which had some autobiographical elements, to “sculpting smoke.” But her descriptions of public advocacy — against nuclear tests, dams, gang rape — arrive here more like dust storms: urgent, impressive events that disrupt the microclimate of this book.
Money and its morality are constant considerations in “Mother Mary Comes to Me.” After a childhood of abuse and material deprivation, Roy is rolling in dough, setting up a charitable trust to deal with the excess, “my crazy royalties.”
Checking her dad into a rehab center: “Thang god for royalties.” Her beautiful apartment in Delhi: “My royalty home, bought wholly with the proceeds of literature. A dangerous place of my own. One from which nobody can order me to get out. Every now and then I kiss the walls and raise a glass and a middle finger to my critics, who seem to think that to write and say the things I do I must live a life of fake, self-inflicted poverty.”
You can see Mary in that middle finger. but she also put the Roy in “royalty.”
MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME | By Arundhati Roy | Scribner | 352 pp. | $30
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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