Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Scribner, release date September 2025)

Being the daughter of a hero isn’t easy. Just ask Arundhati Roy. Her mother Mary gave her the childhood that nightmares are made of, while pursuing dreams that verged on the impossible. Taking an enduring form of revenge, Arundhati took those nightmares and turned them into a Booker Prize winner, her debut novel, The God of Small Things, which Mary Roy embraced as a tribute.

With 89 turbulent and fearless years to her credit, Arundhati’s mother created a life that defied any form of epic fiction, one that breathes pure fire throughout her daughter’s memoir. With two small children, a Bachelor’s degree in education, and no family fortune to support her, Mary Roy left her feckless husband and began to fight for her dreams. She took on the inheritance laws of the state of Kerala, battled them in court, and won a victory for all the women who had been left penniless in favor of their brothers. She met an eccentric architect who agreed to work with her in building a school on a hillside that was deemed unusable and she turned that school into one that is still in existence today, famed for its progressive and creative form of education.

Pallikoodam School was, according to Mary Roy’s daughter, an achievement that took precedence over her two children and became the youngest child in the family. Arundhati’s early years are overshadowed by her mother’s ambition and overwhelmed by her mother’s asthma. As Mary struggles to breathe, her daughter does her best to become her third lung, “one of her valiant organs…breathing my life into hers.” In return she is the primary focus of her mother’s relentless rage and cruelty. 

Running away is the only way for Arundhati to claim her own separate life. As a child  she finds sanctuary on the banks of a nearby river, where for those hours she lives a free and feral existence. At sixteen she leaves home for Delhi where she studies architecture and “gradually, deliberately, transformed myself into somebody else.” By the time she’s eighteen, she stops going home, changing her relationship with her mother from loving her “Irrationally, helplessly, fearfully, completely” to viewing her “coolly, rationally, and from a safe distance--I often failed.”

In the process of detachment, Arundhati creates a life that is less obsessive but as transformative as her mother’s. Famous for her fiction, she has nine works of nonfiction that illuminate her country, her politics, and what she calls in a book title her “seditious heart.”  Unflinchingly she looks at environmental depredation, politically spawned massacres, and the suffering caused by the military occupation of Kashmir. “In the process, like a suicide bomber, I had blown myself to smithereens…I could actually, physically, feel my heart breaking.” In doing this, she receives an accolade from Mary Roy, an expression of love in the words, “baby girl.”

“Wrecked and heart-smashed” when Mary Roy died, Arundhati Roy shows the immense power of her mother’s life as it gives her the impetus for  the achievements of her own. Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati says at the outset, was written so “my mother, my gangster, shall live.” She does indeed. So does her daughter in a work of brutal honesty and blazing love.~Janet Brown