Arundhati Roy Gets Real About Her Mother in New Memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me
Arundhati Roy, the celebrated Booker Prize-winning author of The God of Small Things, is back, but this time she’s not telling a fictional tale.
In her new memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, out on 2 September 2025, Roy lays herself bare. This isn’t a neat, polished autobiography. It’s messy, raw, and incredibly moving.
Gauging 374 runners, the book explores Roy’s complicated relationship with her mama, Mary Roy, an educational colonist and open advocate for women’s rights. It’s a story filled with contradictions, pain and pride, distance and craving, heartache and alleviation.
Mary Roy wasn’t just a parent. She was larger than life, a force of nature. As the author of Pallikoodam Academy in Kottayam, she broke walls in education and women’s rights. Yet, in Roy’s telling, she’s also a delicate, emotionally fraught presence.
When Roy recalls some of her earliest traumas, she doesn’t sugarcoat them. “I am the outcome of their failure to deliver on their promise as abortion-inducers,” she writes, in a statement that cuts deep but reveals the scars she’s carried.
Still, this isn’t a book about hatred. It’s about navigating complexity. Even with all the distance between them, Roy admits her mother’s presence never truly fades. “Just a thought away,” she says. It’s a testament to the ties that linger even when relationships fracture.
Roy’s recollections are severely honest. She recounts times when she was told to leave buses and homes, and moments when her illness was met with harshness rather than care. Yet amidst the pain, there were pockets of warmth — stories, horselaugh, literacy.
She indeed refers to herself as “her mother’s valiant organ child,” pressing the struggles of growing up with a parent who had severe asthma. The line captures both the burden and the bond that defined her parenting.
This duality of neglect and nurture is at the heart of her story. It’s not simple. It’s not black and white.
What makes Roy’s bio stand piecemeal is that it doesn’t try to simplify her mama’s character. Mary Roy was, formerly, inspiring and exhausting, empowering and harsh.
“You can’t hug a porcupine. Not even over the phone,” Roy writes, perfectly capturing the emotional whiplash of loving someone who’s both your greatest supporter and your fiercest critic.
The memoir is not a judgment; it’s an exploration of how love and resentment often coexist, shaping who we become.
Roy’s writing style is as lyrical as it is heartbreaking. At times, it reads like a novel—and she encourages readers to approach it that way. “Read this book as you would a novel. It makes no larger claim. But then, there could be no larger claim.”
In one chapter titled after her debut work, The God of Small Things, Roy reflects on the years she spent writing the novel while dealing with personal turmoil. It’s a rare glimpse into how her art and life constantly collided.
The memoir took shape after Mary Roy’s passing on 1 September 2022. Roy doesn’t attempt to shield readers from her sorrow. She’s transparent about being blindsided by the depth of her grief.
For her, writing the book came a way to piece together the fragments of their relationship.
She questions whether digging into painful recollections feels like betraying her youngish tone, but chooses honesty over comfort. This isn’t an act of vengeance, it’s an act of reckoning.
Mother Mary Comes to Me is a must-read for anyone interested in literature, family ties, feminism, or creative adaptability.
Roy’s story is embedded in veritably specific gestures, growing up in India, navigating societal prospects, and dealing with health struggles, but its themes are universal.
Her trip from pupil of an amateur told by Laurie Baker, to a youthful woman doing odd jobs in Delhi, to a famed pen is anything but ordinary. The memoir shows how our roots, however complicated, never fully leave us.
While comparisons to Jeet Thayil’s Elsewhereans are likely, Roy’s memoir feels far more introspective and emotionally charged. It’s a deep dive, not just an account of events.
Arundhati Roy’s “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” Reviewed | The New Yorker https://t.co/TEDOj7WXQm @LowerHaightbk @BTSLPublishing pic.twitter.com/J1OfEQ7ucr
— WNBA-SF (@WNBASFChapter) September 8, 2025
Author: Arundhati Roy
Title: Mother Mary Comes to Me
Release Date: 2 September 2025
Publisher: Penguin Hamish Hamilton
Themes: Mother-daughter bond, trauma, feminism, creativity, grief, resilience
This book is more than a memoir—it’s an invitation to embrace the discomfort that comes with love, loss, and legacy.
