Nonfiction review: MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

Scribner, September 2025.

Arundhati Roy's memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, tackles her writing career, India's turbulent politics, and a reckoning with her larger-than-life mother, Mary Roy. It covers the author's rocky childhood, her break from her mother and life as an architecture student, the stardom that followed the publishing of her first book, The God of Small Things, and finally how she settled into her role as a reporter and activist for social justice causes all around her beloved India and how she reunited with her mother.

I became a Roy fan back in 1997 after I read The God of Small Things. The story, about two young twins and the caste system in India, captured my imagination. The book won the Booker Prize that year and catapulted Roy into instant fame. Everyone read her book. Everyone wanted another, including me. We were all in for a long wait since she didn't publish another fiction novel for twenty years. When The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was published in 2017, I remember reading an article about what Roy had been up to in the intervening years. She'd turned her attention from fiction to all kinds of people's movements throughout her country. All of her passions are included in the book: displaced villagers, Indian occupation of Kashmir, Afghanistan, and Maoist insurgents. Her second novel was a lot. With explanations of multiple causes and two main storylines curling around each other, all set in an exotic land (to us) on the other side of the world, few women in book club had patience for this book. But I did. I loved Utmost Happiness as much or more than Small Things. I felt like I WAS in India, the writing was so descriptive. 

My husband, who listened to the Mother Mary audiobook with me, commented the book should have been not just Arundhati's memoir but her mother's, too. We figured out that was the point. Mary Roy was such a dominating figure in the author's life that their stories were all tangled up together. Mary, who started a school for girls in their village, Ayemenem, ruled the campus as the queen bee. But whenever she got frustrated by one of her students she would take that frustration out on her daughter or son, not the offending student. Arundhati could never seem to escape her mother's wrath, even when she was a model student. 

Arundhati recounts that after publishing her first book, Mary saw herself as the protagonist in the story. In one scene the twins are being shoved back and forth from one parent to the other with one parent saying, "You take them, I don't want them." Mary wondered how Arundhati remembered that from her childhood. Arundhati said she thought it was fiction and didn't remember such a thing happening to her, but it actually had. She had internalized this ambivalence her mother felt toward her from the beginning.

After the dust settled from the fame that followed winning the Booker Prize, Roy decided to see where life would take her, instead of sitting down and trying to write another novel. She found herself in all corners of India -- trying to help villagers who were doomed to lose their ancestral homes from the flooding caused by a huge dam project; marching around the jungle with Maoist insurgents; nearly getting shot in Kashmir. She spent a night in jail on a contempt of court charge because she wouldn't apologize after being cited for criticizing a judicial ruling and leading a demonstration at the supreme court. Whenever she would talk about differences between gender roles and expectations she would repeat a line said to her earlier -- "Because it is India, my dear." Roy, who narrated the audiobook, said this phrase with such an affected, snobby accent, Don and I found ourselves laughing and repeating the phrase every time we'd hear it.

In December of each year I attempt to uncover the best 50 books published that year by doing a "Best Books Roundup." This past year, 2025, Mother Mary Comes to Me was at the top of my list. (See list here.) This surprised me because it is nonfiction and delighted me because I've loved Roy's novels so much. I immediately added the book to my TBR. When the audiobook came available from the library I invited my husband to join me in listening to it. Now he is a fan of the author, also. Listening to Roy narrate her own life's story was such a treat. The story is so wrapped up in the setting it was appropriate to have the story read by an Indian and why not the author? Now Don wants to read her fiction, once again using the audiobook format. If you haven't read any books by Arundhati Roy, I recommend you start here with this memoir. Her novels are very complex and knowing their back story will likely help you understand aspects of each novel's complexity.

Both Don and I rated the book with 5 stars.

-Anne