Finally, my first review written this year - and it's of a book I read in 2025, but it was one of the last books I finished last year (and one of the best).
2025, #224
Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me
Read 28.11.25 to 26.12.25, reviewed 23.01.26
Borrowed from the library
Mother Mary Comes to Me is a memoir by the Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy, best known for her 1997 novel The God of Small Things. Arundhati's compelling account of her own life, work and development as a writer and activist is constructed around a moving account of her complicated and difficult relationship with her mother Mary Roy, a formidable presence throughout the book's pages, a woman who never said Let it Be (the author's Dedication).
Mary Roy was from a highly educated Syrian Christian family in southern India. She had a university degree in education, her aunt had been a college teacher, and her brother had been a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford, England. She left her alcoholic husband and returned to southern India, where she worked as a teacher before setting up her own school, which her daughter describes as definitely her favourite child. All this was far from easy - Mary Roy had several legal battles with her family over property and inheritance rights, eventually winning a case in the Supreme Court of India, and overturning a law that denied women the right to inherit.
This is just some of the background to the development of a formidable woman, with a commitment to a mixture of strong but sometimes contradictory values and principles, an inheritance that she definitely passed on to her daughter, herself evidently a strong, contentious character. Often when reading this, I thought that Mary Roy was a monster, and Arundhati and her mother were estranged for many years after some outrageous and dramatic scenes, but Arundhati's love of and respect for her mother also come through very clearly.
Arundhati Roy and her brother were pupils at their mother's school, Corpus Christi, before being sent away to boarding school, but could expect no favouritism, rather the opposite. Mrs Roy, as they were expected to address her, was both very demanding and harshly critical of Arundhati as her daughter and student, rarely acknowledging her daughter's efforts to please her, her commitment as a young carer when she was seriously ill, dismissing her early efforts at writing as terrible.
In her memoir, Arundhati Roy also details her work, all kinds of odd jobs to fund herself through her education, work as an architect and draughtsman, her relationships, her move into writing scripts and making films, dealing with all the creative, practical and financial aspects. While as a young woman she said she would never return home, and was estranged from her mother for some time, her description of Mrs Roy's response to her novel The God of Small Things, which included praise and pride along with some thought provoking questions, is very revealing - her mother's response never ceased to matter to Arundhati, and I think she was important to her mother too.
I also enjoyed Roy's accounts of her other writing and creative work and of her other relationships, of the social and political response to her famous novel and the ensuing legal battles, and of some of her political activism. I would like to read some of her non fiction/political writings now, as well as rereading her two novels and this memoir.
Finally, Roy writes about the end of her mother's long life, and the strength of her reaction, prompting her to start writing this memoir, a compelling, intimate and emotional account of how a mother-daughter relationship can shape the lives of both women.
I am now wondering what my own mother would have thought of this book - I am not sure whether she ever read The God of Small Things but I think she might have preferred Mother Mary Comes to Me. I will never know but this is the sort of book that makes me wish I could discuss it with her.
Rating: 4.7