Arundhati Roy and her brother came to call their mother “Mrs. Roy” far more often than any title resembling “mom.” Later, the author Roy would conclude that she had grown up in a cult, “a good cult, a fabulous one even,” in which unquestioning obedience and displays of adoration of “the Mother-Guru” were required. “The only involuntary members, press-ganged into the ways of the cult, were my brother and I.”
Roy’s love-hate relationship with her dramatic, domineering, visionary mother is at the center of her incredible memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. Mary Roy fled her marriage to a man addicted to alcohol, took her young children to Kerala in southern India and founded a school that was quite radical (and successful!) for its place and time. “She was defiant in her belief that boys and girls should play and study and grow up together,” Roy writes, and she “made it her mission to disabuse boys of their seemingly God-given sense of entitlement.”
Beloved at the school, their mother was often demanding and abusive at home. In one searing account, Mrs. Roy beats her son bloody for his poor report card; Arundhati is praised for hers the next morning, causing complicated emotions in the young student. At age 18, Roy cut ties with her mother and didn’t see her again for years. During that time, Roy got an architectural degree, lived in poverty, fell in love with the married man she would eventually marry and then live separately from, and became a screenwriter and a writer. An exceptional writer, as this memoir affirms. Yet even when she won the Booker Prize, she writes, “I still hadn’t lost that very real, very tangible feeling . . . that each time I was applauded, someone else, someone quiet, was being beaten in another room.”
Mother Mary Comes to Me is episodic and rich with detail and observation. It reveals: Why did it take so long for Roy to write another novel after the life-changing success of The God of Small Things? “The freedom I craved . . . was the freedom to live and to write on my own terms.” She has long done so in her fierce, oppositional political writing; the memoir depicts the strong blowback to her left-leaning journalism by India’s right.
Roy writes with wit and a sense of life’s absurdity, as when her mother graciously hosts the launch party for her novel and then unceremoniously vies for the limelight until Roy’s pompous uncle blunders in and saves the day. Roy’s father, once a figure of scorn, transforms himself over time into a jester, balancing on the knife edge between comedy and tragedy. With the passage of time, Roy’s feelings about her indomitable mother evolve and soften. “Seeing her through lenses that were not entirely colored by my own experience of her made me value her for the woman she was,” she observes. “It made me a writer. A novelist.” Intimate and deeply moving, Mother Mary Comes to Me will delight Roy’s legions of readers.
