An Appreciation of Arundhati Roy’s “Mother Mary Comes to Me”

My wife and I started reading “Mother Mary Comes to Me”, simultaneously, I in my kindle and she with the physical book. This is Arundhati Roy’s 2025 memoir exploring her tumultuous relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, framed by Mary’s death at 89 and drawing from Roy’s life in Kerala and beyond. My wife was shocked by the brutal honesty of the book, its depiction of people and the events in her life. Its portrayal of Roy’s relatives, some of whom happen to be known to us personally distressed her. I was, however, quite impressed by the honesty of the book, justifying it as perhaps inspired by the catharsis that Roy needed in assessing her mother’s impact on her life. The book blends personal memory with insights into her path to writing The God of Small Things and commenting on India’s socio-political landscape.

The memoir centers on the mother-daughter bond, portraying Mary as a “shelter and storm” — a survivor who endured abuse, poverty, and fought for Syrian Christian women’s inheritance rights in a landmark Supreme Court case. Roy grapples with memory’s fluidity, calling humans a “soup of memory and imagination,” where fiction blurs into reality, especially in scenes echoing her novel. It parallels personal trauma with national events like the nuclear tests, Narmada Bachao Aandolan against the displacement of people by the construction of dams, and recurring reports of minority persecution in the post 2014 dispensation.

Roy’s prose is electric and whimsical when focused on Mary, shifting fluidly between opposites with freedom and audacity. The narrative employs a hazy, magical tone with vivid anecdotes, sharp humor, and seductive descriptions, though it occasionally repeats scenes or delays explanations, diluting tension. The hawk-eyed detail and rapid pacing makes family dysfunction and politics absorbingly vivid.

Mary’s complex persona is painted as abusive yet heroic, supplemented by colorful relatives like a blind violinist grandmother and an Oxford trained uncle who became a pickle king. All this creates a rich tapestry that humanizes Roy’s activism. It serves as a sourcebook for The God of Small Things, revealing that Ammu’s character was based on Mary. The self-dramatization, and occasional narrative overload, demand reader effort despite their charm. Overall, it’s hailed as brave, bittersweet, and a victory lap for Roy’s voice.

Arundhati Roy’s writing style retains her hallmark lyricism and vivid sensory detail but shifts toward raw vulnerability and directness compared to the playful artifice of her novels like The God of Small Things (1997) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017).

Roy paints her childhood in Kerala with phrases like “humid, river-bound village” that echo her novels’ lush magic realism. “I spent hours on its banks and came to be on intimate, first-name terms with the fish, the worms, the birds and the plants. It [the river] made up for everything that was wrong in my life.”. She reflects on the insular nature of the Syrian Christian society in which she grew up: “After all these years of thinking about it, I have concluded that I grew up in a cult. A good cult, a fabulous one even, but a cult nevertheless, in which the outside world was a fuzzy entity, and in the inside world, unquestioning obedience and frequently demonstrated adoration of the Mother Guru were the basic requirements.” Roy links her development as a writer to the “jungle” of her early years: “I knew even then that language was outside me, not inside me… I needed to hunt it down like prey. Disembowel it, eat it… That was the law of my jungle. It wasn’t a non-violent, vegetarian dream.” She captures the precariousness of their lives in the village, being a “fatherless” family in a traditional society: “I learned early that the safest place can be the most dangerous. And that even when it isn’t, I make it so.”

Novels and memoirs avoid linear paths. Novels do this via multi-perspective mazes and time-shuttling, while memoirs achieve this through memory’s “labyrinth” of anecdotes. Yet novels toy with chronology for emotional distance and revelation; the memoir feels more chronological overall, fragmented by reflection rather than invention, creating rapid, absorbing tension occasionally slowed by repetition. Novels temper horror with humor, detachment, and invented buffers, yielding a hypnotic, universal fable tone. Memoir embraces self-dramatization and “thorny love,” with rawer stakes — detached note-taking amid pain (“one half taking the hit, the other notes”) — infused with wit on eccentric kin but demanding reader confrontation sans fiction’s haze.

Roy’s hallmark is her ability to weave the “small things” of domestic life into the “big things” of history and law. In this essay, she chronicles her mother’s landmark legal battle against the Travancore Christian Succession Act, which denied Syrian Christian women equal inheritance rights. The narrative moves from the intimate (a daughter watching her mother’s eccentricities) to the systemic (the Supreme Court of India). Roy highlights the irony of a woman fighting for “home” while being technically homeless within the framework of traditional law.

The book avoids the “saintly mother” trope. Instead, Roy paints Mary Roy as a “ferocious, complex, and often difficult” figure. Mary is depicted as a woman who broke the mold of the “docile Malayali wife,” opting for divorce and activism at a time when both were social taboos. Roy captures the toll of this rebellion. The “Mother Mary” of the title isn’t just a religious reference; it’s a nod to a woman who had to be her own savior.

Roy employs a prose style that is lyrical yet unsentimental. She uses sharp, sensory details to ground the reader in the humid, politically charged landscape of Kerala. The “house” serves as a central metaphor. It represents security, the patriarchy that denies it, and the literal bricks and mortar Mary Roy fought to claim. The tone shifts between wistful admiration and intellectual rigor. There is a sense of “belated understanding” — the daughter looking back at the mother’s battles with the clarity of adulthood. “She was a woman who didn’t know her place. And because she didn’t know her place, she made a place for all of us.”

Ultimately, “Mother Mary Comes to Me” functions as an origin story for Arundhati Roy’s own activism. It suggests that her voice — often critical of the state and status quo — was forged in the shadow of a woman who refused to be silenced by her own community. It is a masterful exercise in creative non-fiction that elevates a family history into a universal story of feminist resistance.

In Arundhati Roy’s memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, the chapter detailing her 1997 Booker Prize win for The God of Small Things is a masterclass in the “dizzying vertigo” of sudden, global fame. Roy doesn’t just recount the event; she deconstructs the surreal transition from an anonymous writer to a cultural phenomenon. Roy describes the ceremony at London’s Guildhall not as a personal triumph, but as an out-of-body experience. She captures the stiff, formal British tradition clashing with her own identity as an “unlikely” winner — a debut novelist from India. When her name is announced, she describes a sense of “the world tilting.” It wasn’t just a literary award; it was a geopolitical event. She reflects on the brevity of her acceptance, noting the strange sensation of being “crowned” by the very empire her book subtly critiques.

The chapters following the win shift from celebration to a nuanced exploration of the consequences of visibility. Roy is candid about how the prize became both a platform and a cage. Roy describes the “Great Indian Media Circus.” Upon her return to India, she wasn’t just a writer; she was a national trophy. She writes about: The invasive nature of the paparazzi and the pressure to become a “brand” or a spokesperson for an entire subcontinent.

The memoir is not reluctant to embrace the darker side of success. She discusses the legal and social hostility that brewed back home: She details the court cases filed against her in Kerala, where critics claimed the relationship between Ammu and Velutha in her novel was “obscene.” The shift in the literary establishment’s tone — from pride to a subtle resentment of her “overnight” global status.

Perhaps the most significant part of these “post-Booker” chapters is her realization that fame is a currency. Roy explains how the prize money and the global spotlight gave her a “shield.” She decided to use that shield to protect others, marking her transition from fiction writer to the fierce political activist we know today. She describes the decision to donate her prize money and her subsequent involvement in the Narmada Bachao Andolan (the movement against the big dams). “The Booker didn’t just give me a voice; it gave me a megaphone. And I realized very quickly that if I didn’t use it to speak for those being silenced, the megaphone was just a hollow toy.”