Mother Mary Comes to Me

"Yes. It’s a complicated relationship that the narrator is examining: the relationship with her mother. She calls her mother Mrs Roy, first of all. To quote from the book, she says she has “lost her most enthralling subject.” Already that makes me feel compelled to read the book. As I said, it’s novelistic. We follow the writer from her time as a child, then as a student, and onto becoming a writer. She mentions the different, very important, works that she has written, her life as an activist, but it is her mother, Mrs Roy, that is like the sun that she keeps revolving around. I think this makes a beautiful companion piece to her novel The God of Small Things . To read them both together, I think, would be amazing. Roy calls her mother an enthralling subject, but the book itself is enthralling. We are immersed in this narrator’s life, in a different time and place. We really loved reading about the journey of this writer, her personal and political upheavals—the history of India as lived through one family in one particular time period. There’s a lot about transformation in here. The consequences of what happens when you lose someone as important as your mother, as complicated as that relationship might be, and how afterwards one reconfigures one’s life. It felt like an entertaining, enjoyable and monumental work."