Mother Mary Comes to Me is a bestseller I kept noticing on bookstore, in online recommendations, and across book platforms. I don’t usually reach for personal memoirs, and I already knew this book fell into that category. Still, after seeing it so often, curiosity eventually won me over.

As expected, the book is rooted in memory and lineage, shaped mainly around the bond between a mother and a daughter. Told from the perspective of the author herself, Arundhati Roy, the memoir reflects on her relationship with her mother, a woman who was smart, strict, and emotionally distant. Alongside this relationship, Roy also brings in other family members, showing how their presence as well as the absence shaped her upbringing.

Roy writes about being dismissed, ignored, and misunderstood as a child with noticeable restraint. As a reader, I found that Roy’s writing style was not exaggerated or softened into sentimentality. Instead, they are presented in a way that allowing readers to recognize their emotional weight without being so dramatic. This approach gives the book a strong sense of relatability and strength at once.

As the memoir unfolds, personal memories begin to intersect with larger social and political realities in India. Roy weaves in reflections on political climates in Kashmir, the Naxalite movement, and the changing political climate of the 1990s. At the same time, she shares anecdotes from her mother’s school, the lives of the children within it, and the everyday realities that shaped them.

The book also offers glimpses behind the scenes of Roy’s literary career, including the success of The God of Small Things, the controversies that followed its publication, and the impact of winning the Booker Prize. These moments add another layer to the memoir, showing how personal life, public attention, and political responsibility often collided.

Mother Mary Comes to Me makes it obvious that individual lives are never formed in isolation. Family relationships, social structures, and political forces all move together, shaping identity over time. Roy captures this interplay with precision, blending the trivial and the profound in a way that feels thoughtful, grounded, and deeply reflective.

My Favorite Bits

• Like most people in the world, then as well as now, we grew up between shouting and silence. Some of us made up our own minds, others had their minds made up for them.

• All my energies were directed toward decrypting and surviving my immediate environment almost hourly. I lived in the immediate present. I could not look up. I had no sense of the big winds that were blowing

• After all these years of thinking about it, I have concluded that I grew up in a cult. A good cult, a fabulous one even, but a cult nevertheless, in which the outside world was a fuzzy entity, and in the inside world, unquestioning obedience and frequently demonstrated adoration of the Mother Guru were the basic requirements for membership. The only involuntary members, press-ganged into the ways of the cult, were my brother and I.

• The challenge for those of us who are not chosen and instead watch love pass us by is to learn from it, marvel at it, and not grow bitter and incapable of love ourselves.

• I was so numbed by my own despair that I felt I was watching it all from some other lonely, faraway planet. I didn’t realize that I—as I often did—had locked away my rage and disgust in a sealed chamber of my brain. I would unseal it much later, when I became a properly functioning human. If I were to permit myself some retrospective insight, I’d say the numbness also came from helplessness. From witnessing horror and being unable to do anything. From not having a language to describe it, even to myself

• Nothing made me forget the world like reading did. Nothing made me think about the world like reading did. Nothing else filled me up. Nothing else emptied me out.

• If you think she’s just fighting for equal inheritance, you’re wrong. She’s actually fighting for the right not to be a perfect mother, for the right not to be a nice, obedient woman, and most of all for the right not to be a fucking bore like you.

• .. literature can join humans in a bond of quiet intimacy the way almost nothing else can.

• The freedom I craved was the freedom to live and to write on my own terms.

• The world was too ridiculous for me to remain too sad for too long.

• I knew that the only thing to do was to withhold judgment, and, if possible, hope, but to try never to withdraw love, or affection. Of course I knew. But what we know isn’t always in line with what we feel, or what we do.

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Author: Arundhati Roy
Publication date: 2 September 2025
Number of pages: 331 pages

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