Searing honesty: ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’ by Arundhati Roy

Have you ever found yourself in the inexplicable situation where, despite your love of one book from an author, you realise that you have not read anything else by them?

This happened to me recently. Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy’s memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, is on the list of titles to be discussed this year by my book group. I was pleased to see it there, as her debut and award-winning novel The God of Small Things is on my list of all-time favourite books.
Yet I realised that I had not read any of her subsequent works.

Why not?
I absolutely could not say.
Perhaps just time, and the clamour for my reading attention by so many other titles.

I also realised that I knew very little about this author, other than she was born and lives in India, that her debut was based, in part, on some of her childhood experiences, and that she has been an activist for many years.

From the opening pages of Mother Mary (which was shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction) I could see that this was going to be a searingly honest account of her life, from childhood, through formative experiences of young adulthood, taking in her writing career but also the adventures and escapades of her activism on environmental and human rights issues.

A main theme is the troubled, eccentric relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, whose life trajectory was anything but settled and ordinary. Mary was a fiery warrior for women’s rights in an India divided by religion, caste, gender and political beliefs. A single mother of two young children, Mary established a small private school to make a living for her family, but also to put into practice her beliefs about how children should be educated.

She also challenged unfair laws in the courts, battles which lasted decades.

Mary was beloved and feared in equal measure by her children, her employees, colleagues and the children she taught. She was cantankerous, eccentric, unpredictable, and sometimes cruel.

All this her daughter describes, including how her mother’s behaviour led to her decision to leave home forever at an early age, but also when Mary died, how she felt …wrecked, heart-smashed. I am puzzled and more than a little ashamed by the intensity of my response. (ebook loc 2 of 374)

I had never known that beloved landscape, never imagined it, never evoked it, without her being part of it…She was woven through it all, taller in my mind than any billboard, more perilous than any river in spate, more relentless than the rain, more present than the sea itself. (ebook loc 1 of 374)

We are then immersed in the various, often precarious, situations that Arundhati encountered after leaving home; the people who impacted on her teenage and adult life; the path that led, eventually, to her writing The God of Small Things; the reaction of the literary world and her fellow Indians to the Booker Prize win, and what she did after.

As always, I was fascinated by the ‘back story’ of her first novel. It always intruiges me, how a spark of an idea, a memory or image, sound or smell, can be fanned by an artist into the flames that eventually become a finished novel, poem, song or painting.

Once I had finished Mother Mary Comes to Me, I realised that this book is several stories in one. It is the story of the lives that, through accident of birth or choice, were a family. It’s also the story of a nation as it struggles with the journey from colonial possession to independence, from tradition to modernity and everything in between.

Mother Mary Comes to Me was published by Penguin Books in 2025.