Mother Mary comes to me / Arundhati Roy.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Finalist for the Kirkus Prize

A Time Magazine Must-Read Book of 2025

A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that traces her complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati's life both as a woman and a writer.

Mother Mary Comes to Me , Arundhati Roy's first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as "my shelter and my storm."

"Heart-smashed" by her mother Mary's death in September 2022 yet puzzled and "more than a little ashamed" by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, "not because I didn't love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her." And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author's journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and essays, through today.

With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace--a memoir like no other.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Gangster (1)
• Fugitives (8)
• The Cosmopolitans (14)
• "I Love You Double" (19)
• The Sliding-Folding School (23)
• Federico Fellini and the Kottayam Santa (28)
• Collateral (35)
• The Naxalites (40)
• I'm All for the Unconquered Moon (46)
• Laurie Baker and the Bald Hill (48)
• Joe, Jimi, Janis, and Jesus (56)
• "How's That Crazy Mother of Yours?" (61)
• "You're a Millstone Around My Neck" (71)
• "Doesn't She Sound Like That Person in The Exorcist!" (80)
• In Which Jesus Marries a Japanese Parcel (89)
• Cake Walkin' Baby (96)
• In the Shade of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya (102)
• "What's So Funny?" (107)
• They're Gonna Put Me in the Movies (116)
• "Have You Ever Considered Becoming a Writer?" (123)
• Mama Bear, Papa Bear (133)
• The Exquisite Art of Failure (152)
• Flying Rhinos and the Banyan Tree (159)
• In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (168)
• Blasphemy (175)
• "You Are Not Showing India in a Proper Light" (180)
• The Band Breaks Up (185)
• "The Great Indian Rape Trick" (191)
• The God of Small Things (197)
• Things Fall Apart (216)
• Mobile Republic (223)
• Rally for the Valley (227)
• More Trouble with the Law (239)
• Jailbird (247)
• My Seditious Heart (256)
• A Home of My Own (261)
• Utmost Happiness (264)
• Madam Houdini and the Nothing Man (268)
• Walking with the Comrades (288)
• "Her Birth Certificate Was an Apology from God" (301)
• Retreat (307)
• A Declaration of Love (314)
• Acknowledgments (329)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Booker Prize--winning novelist Roy (The Ministry of Utmost Happiness) delivers a bracing memoir that traces her thorny relationship with her mother, teacher and social activist Mary Roy. The author was "heart-smashed" by her mother's death in 2022, despite Mary's sometimes "soul-crushing meanness." In the aftermath, Roy was moved to examine the forces that made Mary tick. With characteristically elegant prose ("My older sibling was a boy, and my younger sibling was a school. There was never any doubt about who our mother's favorite child was"), Roy balances an account of Mary's impressive résumé as an educator and advocate for women's property rights with a portrait of her emotional volatility. Raising Roy and her brother as a single mother in northeastern India, Mary was often cold and verbally abusive, insisting her children call her "Mrs. Roy." Severely asthmatic, constantly aware of her own mortality, and sometimes openly resentful of motherhood, Mary makes for an endlessly fascinating subject. Neither too bleak nor overly conciliatory, the account does justice to often-irresolvable feelings of familial ambivalence. It's a welcome addition to the shelf of memoirs about difficult moms. Agent: Lisette Verhagen, Peters, Fraser, and Dunlop. (Sept.)

Kirkus Book Review

A daughter's memories. Booker Prize--winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy, who raised her two children alone after divorcing her ne'er-do-well husband, was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. In a patriarchal society that oppressed women socially, economically, and legally, she fought to make a life for herself and her family, working tirelessly to become "the owner, headmistress, and wild spirit" of an astoundingly successful school. The schoolchildren respectfully called her Mrs. Roy, and so did Arundhati and her brother. To escape her mother's demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi, where she was studying architecture. After a brief marriage to a fellow student, she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer: screenplays, essays, and at last the novel she titledThe God of Small Things. The book became a sensation, earning her money and fame, as well as notoriety: She faced charges of "obscenity and corrupting public morality." Arundhati sets her life in the context of India's roiling politics, of which she became an outspoken critic. For many years, she writes, "I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I traveled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-warrior." Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter's life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. "I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her." Without her, "I didn't make sense to myself anymore." Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love. An intimate, stirring chronicle. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.