Arundhati Roy's mother made a final admission to her daughter before she passed: "There is no one in the world whom I have loved more than you."
Sent as a text message, it was the only acknowledgment of love the mother ever gave her daughter. Throughout her life, Mary Roy (known as "Mrs Roy" to her brood) was a tempestuous parent, a woman who may have fought for her own emancipation from a patriarchal society but who also inflicted cruel abuse on her two children.
In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Booker Prize-winning writer Roy confronts her tortured relationship with this volatile parent all while taking a long view of her own life as a "seditious, traitor-writer". The memoir, sharp-edged and emotionally raw, is an exercise in realism from an author best known for fantastical stories preoccupied with identity, childhood and love - all concerns apparent here also.
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As is often the case in generational conflict, history can repeat itself, and the Roy family proved no different. Mrs Roy's relationship with her mother was a fractured one, with the two estranged after the older matriarch tried to evict Mrs Roy from the family cottage and install her son instead. Undeterred, Mrs Roy would take the case all the way to India's supreme court - it would take decades to be heard - which struck down the law that prevented Christian women from inheriting their father's property.
Mrs Roy's determination to make a life for herself, one away from the entrapment of a rural tea planation and her alcoholic "nothing man" husband, saw her reject the customs of India's bigoted society. After leaving the farm with her two children, she founded a small school with a British missionary, empowering other young girls through education while subjugating her own at home. Roy endured much of her mother's rage - repeatedly told she was a "millstone around [her] neck" - but not as much as her brother, who was often physically struck.
Mrs Roy so inspired feelings of detachment and self-standing that both children fled at the earliest opportunity. Roy left home at 18 and moved to New Delhi to study architecture, subsisting on meagre food and financial support while gaining a "vagrant disposition". Seven years went by without any contact before the two reconnected when Mrs Roy was brought to the nation's capital by her legal matter.
In the memoir, Roy pushes her mother to the background at this point - much like she did in life - with the matriarch a kind of absent presence at large. Roy had a brief marriage to another student before falling in love with a magnetic film-maker. The relationship saw her creativity awakened along with her own inspired writing practice. First came lyrical essays on making movies in the jungle before the impulse to write "a stubbornly visual but unfilmable book" arrived: The God of Small Things.
Mrs Roy had once encouraged her daughter to practise "free writing" - writing unrestrained by its conventions and fuelled by whatever was on one's mind - a habit that helped while "sculpting smoke" with her celebrated novel. Even though she may have gifted her daughter a talent for independent thought and a majesty with prose, Mrs Roy maintained discomfort with her daughter's overnight success.
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Global fame and relative wealth saw Roy leverage her profile (as well as notoriety) to spotlight national politics. Roy's dissension targeted the human casualties from the rise of Hindu nationalism, the military occupation of the Kashmir region and the coveting of natural land for a destructive dam that would drown thousands. Roy's political activism and forceful public criticism make her an enemy to many - and the respondent to many court proceedings, with one resulting in a brief imprisonment.
What reverberates throughout Mother Mary Comes to Me, an unguarded and often searching self-portrait, is how alike mother and daughter truly are. Both are unmoved by the prejudiced strictures of their conservative country, and both remain determined to never let their womanhood prevent them from achieving autonomy in a patriarchal world. As Roy writes, it's why "I didn't make sense to myself any more" when her mother passed away in 2022.
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In the messy entanglement of motherly love and parental mistreatment, Roy captures the pain and grief underlying a relationship that can now only be celebrated in the aftermath of death. The many contradictions of one parent - "[s]he taught me to write and resented the author I became" - form this charged account of two women's arduous stories of becoming, of mother and daughter.
Mother Mary Comes to Me proves at once stirring and triumphant in revealing two sharply different lives that prove more alike than these two would have ever believed - both fearless and unrepentant.