Mother Mary Comes to Me

"Arundhati Roy is one such modern patron saint, and she takes up the complicated question of success in her exquisite memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me ( public library ) — what success means and looks like in the deepest sense, how its shallow metrics can turn a person into “a cold silver figurine with a cold silver heart,” why “making friends with defeat” is “the very opposite of accepting it” and so-called failure might actually be worth striving for."

"When your mother is your anchor, your icon and your tormentor, how do you deal with her death? That’s what celebrated writer Arundhati Roy grapples with in her searing memoir. It’s a raw look at the feminist force that shaped her as an award-winning novelist and essayist. The story begins in Roy’s childhood in Kerala, India, as her mother, Mary, strikes out on her own and founds a school. As a single mother, Mary is constantly fighting for a space for women like herself and her daughter, but the fight creates resentment that she takes out on her two children. So when Roy loses her in 2022, she is surprised by the intensity of her grief over a woman she writes was “my shelter and my storm.” What shape is she without the mother she ran from at 18 to survive? What shape is she without the woman who taught her never to shrink in the face of injustice, without her “gangster”? It’s a story of turbulent love and of liberation that is beautiful, witty and at times uncomfortable to read."

"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."