A New York Times Bestseller
Named One of The New York Times Book Review’s Top Ten Books of the Year
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography | Finalist for the Kirkus Prize | Nominated for the Women's Prize for Nonfiction
One of the best-reviewed books of the year, a raw and deeply moving memoir that “pulses with compassion and moral outrage” (The Wall Street Journal) 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.
In this, her first work of memoir, Arundhati Roy writes, “Perhaps even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject.”
Mother Mary Comes to Me, is an intimate chronicle, “full of precise imagery and blistering emotional intelligence” (The Washington Post), of the relationship between two women, a school teacher and a writer, who happen to be mother and daughter. Roy writes with a novelist’s unsettling ability to be inside her own story as well as outside it, simultaneously child and adult, attached and detached, protagonist and narrator. She describes how she came to be the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”
“Heart-smashed” by Mary’s death, 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.”
With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me “builds worlds that are revolutionary, made from the darkness that she spins into purpose” (The New Republic). An ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—Mother Mary Comes to Me is a memoir like no other.
What People Are Saying
A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2025
“The prizewinning novelist’s unsparing memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, captures the eventful life and times of her mother, a driven educator and imperfect inspiration.” The New York Times Book Review
“An electrifying look at the author’s career and activism.” People Magazine
“Brave and absorbing...In this remarkable memoir, the Booker-winning novelist looks back on her bittersweet relationship with her mercurial mother...The world described in the first part of the book provides much of the material for The God of Small Things. But these pages aren’t significant for giving us access to Roy’s inspiration, or as a preamble to her life as a bestselling writer who would go on to become an oppositional political voice. Even if she were none of these things or had never written her novel, they would be utterly absorbing. They have a wonderful, self-assured self-sufficiency.” Guardian
“A tender and ambivalent memoir about the difficult Mrs. Roy and a withering polemic about India’s political ills...full of precise imagery and blistering emotional intelligence... It is no accident that Roy is at her most meticulous and probing when she focuses on the person who taught her that a woman, too, can be a full-fledged human being—both a marvel and a monster, both a teacher and a tyrant...Mrs. Roy is not only this book’s eponym but its heroine, and by far its most interesting character.” The Washington Post
“Roy, the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, channels warmth, moral clarity and a sweeping bird’s-eye view of modern India to tell her life story, which was shaped by poverty, violence, political upheaval and—most of all—the volatile single mother who raised her.” The New York Times
“This book pulses with compassion and moral outrage…Ms. Roy acknowledges that her difficult mother shaped the free-spirited, headstrong, risk-taking writer she became…It’s clear from this memoir that while Ms. Roy has lost her chief adversary, she hasn’t lost her fire.” The Wall Street Journal
“Writers have the ability to tell stories that create the world we want to live in...With every book, every essay, every speech, Roy builds worlds that are revolutionary, made from the darkness that she spins into purpose.” The New Republic
“The first memoir from Roy details her come-up as a writer, but it’s as much a biography of her complicated, compelling single mother, Mary…fascinating.” New York Magazine
“Cinematic…dense with the lyrical language, deep empathy and fierce social critique that have made Roy’s novels international bestsellers….By book’s end, Roy can take stock of the contradictions in her mother’s life—her triumphs, her passionate advocacy for her students, her ‘soul-crushing meanness’—and still love her dearly…Mother Mary Comes to Me may pack the same ‘heart-smashing’ wallop on readers. It is a masterpiece of memoir writing, a rich tapestry of memory, reckoning and longing. ” May-lee Chai, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist Arundhati Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother...Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love. An intimate, stirring chronicle." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)