Arundhati Roy’s memoir of love, trauma, and endurance
Book review: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy.
Trauma rarely remains private, particularly in environments where family, law, religion, and reputation are tightly intertwined.
Arundhati Roy uses her mother’s death not as an occasion for tribute, but as a point of pressure. Something unresolved insists on being examined.
What stood out to me is how little interest the book has in closure. It begins from the blunt fact that grief can be overwhelming even when love was mixed with fear, resentment, and harm, and it refuses to tidy that up for the reader.
Across the pages, Roy builds a braided account that moves between the logistical chaos after her mother’s death and the long history that made that chaos inevitable.
Memory is the engine, but it is treated as unstable material, argued over and reshaped, not as a clean archive.
“Most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination, and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.”
She revisits childhood homes in Ayemenem and Kottayam, not for nostalgia, but to show how volatility becomes normal when it is daily. Alongside this, she tracks her mother’s public life as a builder of institutions and a legal fighter, especially the inheritance case that challenged the Travancore Christian Succession Act.
She keeps folding her writing and political activism back into the family story, showing how courts, schools, churches, and public outrage do not sit outside the self. They help make it.
What she gradually reveals is a pattern of double truths that refuse to cancel each other out.
Her mom, whom she refers to as Mary Roy, appears as both engine and hazard. She is emotionally extractive with her children, unloading fear and rage onto them, while also shaping generations of students into confident, questioning people.
Love is repeatedly invoked to justify allowing scarring to continue because endurance is mistaken for virtue. Respectability operates as a quiet law, policing who belongs where, who is decent, and which kinds of suffering are allowed to be seen.
Roy widens the frame to show how this logic extends into public life, where violence against women becomes an atmosphere, normalized through jokes, films, and bureaucratic indifference. Applause, whether for political movements or literary success, is rarely neutral. Someone else is usually absorbing the cost.
“On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room.”
The book is strongest when it holds these contradictions without rushing to judgment.
Roy’s voice uses humor, sharp phrasing, and moments of surreal clarity to make fear and fury legible without turning them into spectacle. Her treatment of writing itself is particularly effective. It appears as labor and instinct at once, a way of tracking language like an animal and then collapsing from exhaustion.
The legal battles, accusations, and moral policing that surround her adult life are not framed as exceptional persecution, but as recurring tools of control in a society that knows how to crush the small and the inconvenient first.
Where the book occasionally wobbles is in its density.
The accumulation of memory, public conflict, and political commentary can feel relentless, and some readers may wish for more air between sections. But that pressure also seems deliberate. The book aims to show what it feels like to live without clear separations. This is a book for readers who are willing to sit with discomfort and partial truths. It will resonate most with people interested in how family life intersects with law, caste, gender, and public morality, and with readers who understand that survival often involves learning the wrong names for things.
You do not come away with lessons or reconciliation. You come away with a sharper lens for recognizing how endurance, fear, and love are taught, mislabeled, and passed on. That clarity is not comforting, but it is useful.
On my damage meter, this clocked at 5. Doesn’t leave you alone.