Arundhati Roy's ​Mother Mary Comes to Me

Reviewed by Raksha Muthukumar

(Simon & Schuster, 2025)

In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy recalls her life story the way she was taught to see it from a young age—as an extension of her mother’s. Through pages filled with bittersweet gratitude and weary, clear-eyed affection, Roy allows us a glimpse into the relationships in one household in rural Kerala that became a foundation for political impact that reaches every corner of India. Her memoir highlights the parallels between the complicated and oftentimes thankless love we can hold for home, and for homeland.
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After transforming the grief of years of hand-to-mouth desperation and familial estrangement into literary artistry of international acclaim, Roy seems to ask us—and herself—was it worth it? Her survivor’s guilt and fervent dedication to creating art for political resistance are contextualized in this memoir, which is filled with characters and places as compelling and contradictory as any in her world-famous fiction. Roy braids together the threads of a mother-daughter relationship that is at once larger than life, and familiar to every household.  

​To bridge the chasm between the legacy of love she left for those whose lives she touched and the thorns she set down for me, like little floaters in my bloodstream—fishhooks that still catch on soft tissue as my blood makes its way to and from my heart—is why I write this book. It is as hard to write as it is not to.

Roy remembers her mother, Mrs. Mary Roy, as a formidable pioneer of education and women’s autonomy [After this, I will refer to Arundhati Roy (the author) as just “Roy,” and her mother as “Mrs. Roy”]. Mrs. Roy’s legacy includes a 1986 Supreme Court case granting Christian women equal property inheritance rights in the family’s home state of Kerala. She founded a school in 1967, Pallikoodam, and spent 50 years growing it from a single room in the local Rotary Club to an academy that is, to this day, consistently ranked in the top 5 in all of India in the co-ed day+boarding school category*. She graduated generations of students whose prospects grew far beyond the expectations left for them by the region’s only recently departed Christian missionaries.
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Mrs. Roy’s fabled legacy came with a casualty at home, in the form of a codependent, volatile relationship with her daughter. Roy writes frankly about her mother, neither embellishing victories, nor diminishing abuses. Roy herself has become one of modern India’s most well-known feminist thinkers and liberatory political dissidents. She recognizes that the torch she carries was lit by her mother’s revolutionary matchstick, and tries to reconcile that with the equally blazing heartache she endured in their relationship.

​I tried to breathe for her. I became her lungs. Her body. I attached myself to her in ways she wasn’t aware of. I became one of her valiant organs, a secret operative, breathing my life into hers.

In 1997, Roy won the Booker Prize for her debut novel The God of Small Things. Her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and now Mother Mary Comes to Me, are also NYT Bestsellers. After the Booker Prize, Roy became India’s sweetheart, the beloved celebrity author who earned international acclaim for her countrymen to gobble up as their own. Her popularity quickly dissipated when she refused to hold her tongue on subjects disfavored by the Indian government, and she fell dangerously from public grace.
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In between her globally celebrated releases, Roy receives much less recognition for her extensive nonfiction writings on overlooked injustices happening across her country. She brings to light the suffering of oppressed and unrepresented people fighting for their homes, the environment, and against occupation and slaughter. Invited into conflict zones by revolutionaries across India, she gives them all a voice. She writes for the people in the militarized mountains of Kashmir, the women fighting to preserve the Narmada Valley, the communist guerillas in the jungles of Kerala, the Muslims in the bloodied streets of Gujarat, and the freethinkers from the universities who rot in the jails. All of these struggles are touched upon only briefly in this memoir, only a few pages each, but each with the force of a nuclear bomb, leaving the propaganda of the current government of India in shambles, looking as feeble as it truly is.

Mrs. Roy called the day before I left. She had not the slightest inkling of what I was about to do. Perhaps buried somewhere deep in her byzantine soul she still had a mother’s instinct:

“I’ve been thinking… what this country really needs is a revolution.”

How could I not love her?
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How could I ever pretend to understand her?

​We soon learn the dark side of Roy’s own activist coin. We’re invited into her personal turmoil, the guilt that dogs her in the wake of unexpected wealth and fame. She exposes her own discomfort with stability and security, and the toll that takes on those close to her. We learn of the restlessness that causes her to leave her partners when their shared desperation settles into stagnant comfort. Like her mother before her, Roy’s dedication to her mission and her art comes at a price to those closest to her.

​I followed my instinct, which is the place from where all art and literature comes. It showed me the way. Once again, I made the safest place the most dangerous. Once again, I ran. I moved out. I told the girls that now that they were grown-up, it was time for me to fly away

At their mother’s funeral, Roy’s brother questions her grief after the lifetime of vitriol they endured. Whether in prison for her politics, or at her mother’s deathbed bearing the brunt of psychosis-induced abuse, Roy demonstrates a moving but sometimes dangerous sort of love for her country and her family. Her memoir invites us to make space for the multitude of things it's possible to feel simultaneously for the people and places we love. It asks us what we’re willing to do in the name of that love, and what that love does to us in return.
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For Arundhati Roy, love is most comfortable as emotional martyrdom. Her love for mother India is as deep and as fraught as her love for her Indian mother. She was and is consumed by her sense of responsibility towards them, an unwavering dedication that her mothers pay back by alternatingly lauding or spitting upon her. She reached towards Mrs. Roy’s expectations, and was resented whenever she succeeded. She fights for India by fighting against India. She is most comfortable here, consumed by a purpose that can only be found in love from and for such unstable forces.

*​According to CFORE and EducationWorld rankings between 2024-2025

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Raksha Muthukumar is a Tamil queer woman, police abolitionist, and lover of tiny rodents. She has a background as a tech labor organizer and teen sex educator, which she combines now as a journalist in the sex+digital rights space. You can find more of Raksha's fiction, nonfiction, and advocacy work on her website raksha.gay, or follow her on instagram or bluesky.