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.

Notable Highlights

I have seen and written about such sorrow, such systemic deprivation, such unmitigated wickedness, such diverse iterations of hell, that I can only count myself among the most fortunate. I have thought of my own life as a footnote to the things that really matter. [loc. 50]

I left my mother not because I didn’t love her, but to be able to continue to love her. Staying would have made that impossible. [loc. 65]

fiction. I learned that day that most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination—and that we may not be the best arbiters of which is which. [loc. 96]

On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room. If you pause to think about it, it’s true, someone is. [loc. 467]

Sometimes my mother behaved as though all of this was my brother’s fault. Because he was the only man she could reach, the only man she could punish for the sins of the world. The way she was with him has queered and complicated my view of feminism forever, filled it with caveats. [loc. 475]

Like most people in the world, then as well as now, we grew up between shouting and silence. Some of us made up our own minds, others had their minds made up for them. [loc. 552]

It was almost as though for her to shine her light on her students and give them all she had, we—he and I—had to absorb her darkness. Today, though, I am grateful for that gift of darkness. I learned to keep it close, to map it, to sift through its shades, to stare at it until it gave up its secrets. It turned out to be a route to freedom, too. [loc. 570]

When it came to me, Mrs. Roy taught me how to think, then raged against my thoughts. She taught me to be free and raged against my freedom. She taught me to write and resented the author I became. [loc. 944]

We went for late-night shows and sat in the cheapest seats, in the front row. We looked up the nostrils of the actors in The Reincarnation of Peter Proud. [loc. 958]

The challenge for those of us who are not chosen and instead watch love pass us by is to learn from it, marvel at it, and not grow bitter and incapable of love ourselves. [loc. 1040]

The more our world fractures into dagger-shaped shards, the more we club each other to death with our genes, our gods, our flags, our languages, the color of our skin, the purity of our roots, our histories both true and false—the more my answer to that question remains the same. I’m here now. It isn’t a slogan or a solution to anything. Just the personal feelings of an off-grid drifter. [loc. 1372]

Mrs. Gandhi’s older son, Rajiv Gandhi, dismissed the massacre callously: “When a big tree falls, the ground shakes.” He would soon be elected prime minister with a huge majority in Parliament. That victory went a long way toward convincing politicians and political parties that murdering minorities helped them to win elections. In the years to come we would watch it happen over and over. [loc. 1612]

Of my two grandfathers, one was an entomologist and the other was a soldier-boxer. And it was the entomologist who turned out to be the violent one.) [loc. 1707]

said, “I want you to promise me that you will go home and finish this book. You will do nothing other than finish writing this book. If anything happens to upset you, remember that I’m standing right behind you like an old elephant, flapping my ears to cool you down.” [loc. 3508]

What nearly killed her, though, was her silent school campus. Empty swimming pool, empty auditorium, empty dormitories. She couldn’t understand what online classes were. They say it’s all been moved to some sort of a cloud now. [loc. 3810]

I wanted to hug her and reassure her that everything would be OK. But you can’t hug a porcupine. Not even over the phone. [loc. 3815]