Beyond Fiction: Arundhati Roy’s Revealing Memoir About Her Mother

Arundhati Roy, renowned worldwide for The God of Small Things and her outspoken political essays, has released her first full-length memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me (September 2025), a deeply personal account that centers on her extraordinary mother, Mary Roy, at its heart. The memoir is many things, including a reckoning, a tribute, and an exploration of how identity, creativity, conflict, and love weave together to shape a literary life.

Mary Roy emerges in Roy’s memoir not just as a mother but as a powerful educator, feminist, and force of nature. She founded a progressive school in Kottayam, fought a landmark legal battle in India’s Supreme Court to secure equal inheritance rights for Christian women, and refused to fit comfortably into the expectations placed on women in her community.

Yet for her daughter, Mary is also “Mrs Roy,” addressed with formal distance, displaying a symbol of authority, rigor, and sometimes severe expectation. This formal address was a boundary set by Mary herself, intended to preserve discipline and avoid favoritism among her students, but it also shaped the emotional landscape of Roy’s childhood.

From early years in Assam, to moving to Ooty and finally settling in Kerala, Roy’s upbringing was marked by instability, legal battles over property, asthma-related illness (both in her mother and its consequences for the household), and a rigid sense of order at home. Through her memoir, Roy shows how Mary Roy’s exacting nature, sometimes harsh, taught her to think sharply, to resist complacency, and to write with uncompromising clarity. Even while she felt her mother’s critiques as painful, Roy also recognises that those very standards pushed her toward intellectual freedom and artistic ambition.

But the memoir does not smooth over the complexity of mother-daughter relationships. There is love, yes, but also rupture. Roy recounts a time in her youth when she shared with her mother that she had a boyfriend, provoking a violent reaction that led her to leave home for Delhi. This estrangement was not unusual. Roy describes a childhood oscillating between admiration and fear, dependency and rebellion. These turning points, leaving home, forging a life as a writer, and returning in some ways to her roots, are partly how she understands her own identity.

After her mother died in 2022, Roy began writing Mother Mary Comes to Me not simply as a memorial but as a way of living through grief, tension, and unresolved emotion. The book shows how losing Mary felt like losing a framework of identity. Roy writes, “the first night in a Mrs Roy-less world, I spun unanchored in space with no coordinates. I had constructed myself around her.”

What makes this memoir especially compelling is that Roy refuses to reduce her mother, or their relationship, to mere good or bad. Mary Roy is portrayed in all her contradictions: the visionary activist who could be simultaneously loving and demanding, disciplined and volatile, fierce and fragile. Roy’s challenge in writing this book, she says, was to capture those complexities without casting judgment, simplification, or vengeance. She wants to hold both admiration and frustration in the same hand.

Readers of Roy’s earlier fictional work will recognize echoes of her life here, with some elements of character, setting, and conflict overlapping with those found in The God of Small Things, for example. But memoir allows her to step out of the fictional prism and share the raw details, including the smells, the conflicts, illnesses, small moments of tenderness, and betrayal that shaped not only her childhood but also her writer’s voice.

Mother Mary Comes to Me is a vivid exploration of how even the most difficult maternal influence can be foundational. It’s a book about inheritance, not just of property or privilege, but of language, politics, identity, and inner conflict. It is, in Roy’s words, a memoir, but also an act of intellectual and emotional survival. For anyone interested in literature, feminism, family, or just the messy beauty of how we grow, Roy’s memoir is a powerful reminder: we are constantly being shaped by those who raised us, even when we leave, even when we push back, and even when they are gone.