Mother Mary Comes to Me ★★★★★

Beautiful, poetic, and brutally candid, as she always is, Arundhati Roy writing only her third book, memoirs her childhood shaped by her dominant and 'crazy' mother with a raw intensity that you can only hope to emulate.

Although I knew about her architecture and movie-making days, especially the "In Which Annie Gives It To Those Ones," I had no idea about her childhood and young adulthood spent in trauma and scarcity.

• Format: 352 pages, Kindle Edition
• Published: September 2, 2025 by Scribner
• ISBN: 9781668094730 (ISBN10: 1668094738)
• ASIN: B0DV69BR81:
• LanguageEnglish

Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”

“Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022 yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.” And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and essays, through today.

With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, 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.