Mother Mary Comes to Me

In her first work of memoir, Arundhati Roy, the acclaimed author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, turns inward to tell the deeply personal story of her relationship with her mother, Mary Roy—a fierce, unconventional, and formidable woman whose influence shaped Roy’s life, identity, and writing.

When Mary died in 2022, Roy was overwhelmed by grief and unsettled by the intensity of her response. Trying to understand the complicated bond between them, she began to write about the mother she had left at eighteen, not because she did not love her, but because distance was necessary for that love to survive.

From her unconventional childhood in Kerala, India, where Mary founded a school and raised her children as a single mother, to the experiences that would eventually lead Roy to become one of the world’s most celebrated writers, Mother Mary Comes to Me traces a life shaped by love, conflict, independence, and loss.

Intimate, fearless, and unexpectedly funny, this is a memoir about the complicated nature of family and the enduring power of a mother’s influence. It is also a moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the woman who was, in Roy’s words, both her “shelter and her storm.”