A Daughter’s Reckoning with Her Shelter and Her Storm
When Paul McCartney sang “When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me,” he channeled the comforting memory of his late mother offering wisdom and solace. But unlike McCartney’s mother who appeared in his dream and said “It will be all right, just let it be,” Arundhati Roy’s mother was one “Who never said Let it be.” This dark irony sets the tone for Roy’s first memoir, a book that takes its title from the Beatles song yet tells a story far more turbulent, more complicated, and infinitely more human.
Published in September 2025, Mother Mary Comes to Me is a raw and deeply moving memoir that traces the complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life both as a woman and a writer. After Mary’s death in September 2022 at age 89, Roy was “heart-smashed,” puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response to the death of the mother she ran from at age eighteen, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.”
The Formidable Mary Roy: Icon and Antagonist
Mary Roy was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. In a patriarchal society that oppressed women socially, economically, and legally, she fought to make a life for herself and her family, working tirelessly to become “the owner, headmistress, and wild spirit” of an astoundingly successful school. She was also the plaintiff in a landmark 1986 Supreme Court case that established equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women in Kerala.
But Mary Roy was far from a simple hero. In the NPR interview, Roy described her mother as being “like an airport with no runways. You could never land.” The memoir doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of this relationship. Roy reveals how her mother called her a “bitch” and how she got used to being told ‘get out of my house,’ ‘get out of my car,’ ‘get out of my life.’ Mary Roy, a chronic asthmatic with a flair for drama, kept her children in line by warning them that any misbehavior on their part might trigger a fatal attack.
Yet Roy captures something essential about maternal complexity. As she reflected, “I mean, now when I think of it, I think I was her mother, you know? Like, I was the one who continuously needed to try and understand her and why is she doing this, or why is she saying that? Sometimes it was so tiring. As a child, I could see her fighting for the space for women. I admired that even then. Even when I was the victim of her wrath and her anger and her resentment, I could somewhere see that it was because of what she was doing and what she was doing was partly for me, too, not because I was her daughter, but because I was a woman.”
A Writer’s Origin Story
After Mary’s death, Roy writes, “Perhaps even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject. In these pages, my mother, my gangster, shall live. She was my shelter and my storm.”
The memoir serves as a profound origin story for one of the most significant voices in contemporary literature. Readers familiar with Roy’s fiction and essays might be surprised to learn she initially trained and worked as an architect, followed by fruitful stints as an actor and a scriptwriter before she stunned the literary world with her Booker Prize-winning debut, The God of Small Things.
The memoir also serves as a sourcebook for Roy’s prize-winning novel The God of Small Things. Its protagonist, Ammu, is modeled on Mrs. Roy, and Roy’s uncle G. Isaac stars as Chacko, a Rhodes scholar and Marxist who models failure to his niece. Roy herself acknowledges this deep connection between her mother and her literary work, noting in the memoir that her “cold moth” asked if she could be in the book, and Roy told her she most certainly could.
A Tapestry of India, Politics, and Identity
Beyond the intimate portrait of a mother-daughter relationship, Mother Mary Comes to Me is a work that takes on many subjects and themes: two super-strong Indian women and the dynamics between them; the relations between Indian siblings, spouses, generations, sexes, classes, and ethnic groups; the trauma of intergenerational family violence; the legacy of colonialism and importance of the English language; neo-imperialism; the persecution of indigenous people, Sikhs, and Muslims; dams and the environment; free speech; patriarchal norms; and the never-ending war in Kashmir.
Roy’s ability to weave rich, evocative language with sharp political observations creates a compelling narrative that feels both personal and universal. Her reflections on Hindu Nationalism and the socio-political landscape of India lend weight to her personal journey, turning it into a reflection on culture, identity, and resistance.
The Writing: Lyrical, Non-Linear, and Uncompromising
Roy does not write in straight lines. Like memory, her prose is recursive, looping back, darting sideways, circling a moment until its full emotional weight emerges. This non-linear structure mirrors the memoir’s central theme: that love, especially maternal love, is messy, contradictory, and resistant to neat storytelling.
Few contemporary authors bend English with such suppleness, marrying the cadences of Malayalam-inflected speech with the playfulness of an ear tuned to poetry. The sentences unspool with a musicality that can pivot from biting irony to heartbreaking lyricism within a single page. Critics have praised the work’s prose extensively. The memoir has been described as “cinematic…dense with the lyrical language, deep empathy and fierce social critique that have made Roy’s novels international bestsellers…a masterpiece of memoir writing, a rich tapestry of memory, reckoning and longing.”
Critical Reception and Recognition
Since its publication, Mother Mary Comes to Me has garnered widespread acclaim. The book is a Finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and has been celebrated as a LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2025.
Shelf Awareness notes that with “staggering clarity and self-awareness, Mother Mary Comes to Me excavates the deeper truths behind a fraught yet liberating bond with a mother who instinctively understood that Roy ‘has a writer’s heart.'” The review emphasizes how the book memorializes the maternal courage and devotion that was Mrs. Roy’s final bequest.
More Than a Memoir
At its core, Mother Mary Comes to Me is more than a remembrance of a parent. It is an ode to difficult love, to the pursuit of freedom, and to the costs of choosing authenticity over obedience. In writing about her mother, Roy also charts the conditions that made her the uncompromising writer and activist she became.
Roy poignantly reflected on the aftermath of her mother’s death: “You know, I had to spend so much of my life trying to manage this relationship, and in order to manage it, I had to become a very strange shape. And when the reason for being that shape isn’t there, why am I like this, you know?”
The memoir ultimately reveals how her mother’s presence and her absence shaped Roy in equal measure. Mary emerges as a woman of contradictions: uncompromising, fiercely protective, and at times unbearably demanding. For Roy, this was both wound and gift, storm and shelter. Her mother’s defiance of convention, her insistence on living life on her own terms, became the template against which Roy forged her own voice as a writer and activist.
A Must-Read for Our Times
With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.
For readers seeking to understand one of the most important literary voices of our generation, for those grappling with complex family relationships, or for anyone interested in the intersection of personal narrative and political consciousness, Mother Mary Comes to Me offers an unforgettable reading experience. It’s a book that refuses easy answers, celebrates difficult women, and ultimately honors the messy, contradictory, essential nature of maternal love.
As Roy herself demonstrates, sometimes the most profound act of love is to tell the truth—even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it’s painful, and especially when it’s about the people who shaped us most.
