14/01/2026
Our Now Book club reading!
Discussion on Sunday 25th Jan.
Join us!
Some people shape us gently, like soft rain nurturing seeds. Others shape us like storms—tearing through our lives, uprooting everything we thought we knew, leaving devastation and unexpected blooms in equal measure. Arundhati Roy's mother, Mary Roy, was both. She describes her 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." What emerged is Mother Mary Comes to Me—a raw and deeply moving memoir.
Part of what makes Mother Mary Comes To Me such a successful narrative is the grit and depth of the subject, Mary Roy. Abusive, cruel, and above all else, a survivor. Mary Roy flits from catastrophic failures—at one point, the family of three was starving and squatting in a relative's house only to eventually be kicked out—to legacy-defining successes; the Travancore Christian Succession Act, which stated that daughters had no right to their father's property, was legally challenged before the Indian Supreme Court by Mary, and she won.
This isn't a conventional memoir that neatly resolves childhood trauma or offers forgiveness wrapped in a bow. It's something rarer: an unflinching portrait of loving someone who hurt you, admiring someone who diminished you, and becoming who you are precisely because of—and in spite of—them.
