Mother Mary Comes to Me - Arundhati Roy
A review of Arundhati Roy’s memoir as a disciplined record of formation whose composure ultimately limits its emotional reach
373 pages · Paperback · Hamish Hamilton, 2025
A Memoir of Formation
Mother Mary Comes to Me reads as a record of formation rather than confession, and that distinction matters. The opening chapters centre on Roy’s mother, a figure whose authority shapes the early atmosphere of the book. Control appears early and close. These pages carry weight without excess. Nothing is dramatised. Nothing is excused. Here, the memoir is at its strongest.
As the narrative moves outward, the book loosens. Delhi appears as momentum rather than refuge. A first lover enters briefly and exits without ceremony. Italy follows, then cinema, each stage offering access without belonging. Roy treats these years plainly, sometimes too plainly. Ambition appears practical. Movement matters more than attachment. The account is lucid, but it rarely deepens into discovery.
Marriage enters without display. Affection is assumed rather than examined. Pradip Krishen appears as partner and ballast, part of the conditions that allow writing to happen. Roy is direct about this. Work requires stability. Books arrive through shared labour as much as solitude. Still, the emotional texture here remains thin. The memoir reports more than it interrogates.
When The God of Small Things enters the book, it does so cautiously. Publication brings attention rather than relief. Acclaim sharpens scrutiny. Roy moves quickly past success and towards consequence: surveillance, hostility, pressure from the state. These sections are controlled, but they also feel compressed, as if the book is eager to move on without fully reckoning with the personal cost of literary success.
Politics runs through the memoir without separation. Caste, language, violence and power appear as lived facts. Domestic authority shades into institutional authority. The scale changes; the logic holds. By the time the government becomes explicit, the pattern already feels familiar. This continuity is convincing, but it limits surprise. The memoir confirms more than it complicates.
Roy does not exempt herself from scrutiny. She acknowledges the damage left in the wake of her choices, particularly in love, and does not attempt to soften it. Exits leave marks. Freedom carries cost. The recognition sharpens the portrait. Yet the reckoning rarely deepens into disturbance. The book resists melodrama so firmly that it often stops short of emotional risk.
What emerges is a cool, settled posture. Roy does not posture. She does not seek approval. She keeps speaking. The stance feels deliberate rather than reactive. Presence without allegiance. Speech without permission. That composure gives the memoir authority, but it also keeps the reader at a distance.
A brief note on the audiobook, which I listened to alongside the text. Roy’s husky, deliberate delivery carries authority. At normal speed it felt slow. Slightly increased playback made the rhythm easier to sustain.
This is a book that invites marking. I wanted notes in the margins, not as decoration, but to track returns, echoes and repetition. It rewards attention, though not always with revelation.
Readers looking for reconciliation may resist it. The mother is not redeemed. The past remains intact. Success does not revise early damage. What remains is a clear account of how a writer forms under constraint and continues once the cost of clarity is known.
The memoir stays restrained without becoming diffuse. Its authority lies in composure. Its limitation lies there too. Finely written and disciplined, it stopped short of the aftershock that marks a personal five-star read.