Reviewed by L. Lois
Mother Mary Comes to Me
by Arundhati Roy
Scribner Canada
ISBN: 978-1-6680-9505-8, Sept 2025, 30 pages, $C39.99
There are books you can lose yourself in. Books that grab you by the throat and haul you around. Books so simple they are brilliant. So angry they are explosive. So forgiving they are impossible.
…I never managed to get used to or anticipate the sudden shifts, the sunlight and shadow, the precipitous climate changes in her moods. But I had learned to stand just outside the range of their clawing, lashing fury…In truth I am constructed from its debris. (316)
If memoir is your ticket. If you’re a sucker for a life story that only uses the crayon colours it loves best. If you wonder what kind of woman reared the author of The God of Small Things (1997 Booker winner) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017 longlist), there’s an autobiography on the shelves, calling your name. It’s time to run, not walk, to the library or bookstore and snag your copy. Tell your partner and kids you’re going offline for the next three hundred pages.
Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me is a work of art. It is maddening and hilarious. It is impossible to believe, and it must be true. It reconciles pain with joy, while deftly refusing affectation and excuse. It’s the facts and only the facts, ma’am. (And a little spice because, well, “This was India, my dear.”)
Perversely, it made me feel forlorn and terribly lonely. It made me worry that the unsanctioned ways in which I loved and lived were too precarious, too fragile to withstand real adversity. (259)
If there’s a lesson to learn from Roy’s telling of her troubled relationship with her domineering mother and her absent father, it’s that rough and tumble produces diamonds. There are bits of magic — visions of mother walking on water, pages of hand-written stories sitting on a coffee table waiting for a publisher to notice them, the seduction of a married man, tripping into a movie role while penniless and, finally, falling headlong into the world of international fame and its cool millions.
It’s a Cinderella story that proves, page after endearing page, that its author was born wise, born able to withstand her mother’s unending abuse, with a bidi between her pert daughterly lips. Wicked mother has nine lives and spends them in a rage that produces thousands of school children who adore her — along with a biological son and daughter who roll their eyes in unison. Roy takes us back to the beginning, when mother’s rage was abject poverty and an alcoholic husband. Then, we move forward to the tides turning — each member of the family discovering financial independence, unique eccentricity, and self-protective distance from each other.
I had to go into the courtroom alone. I was given one last chance to be a Reasonable Man and apologize. I politely declined. (247)
Mother Mary Comes to Me draws you in, ties you up, and refuses to let you go. Mother will bluster loudly, daughter will glorify lucky breaks as decisions, a fall from the ladder will be patched up as if there was no bloody mess, and you’ll wonder if the key to success might be hardship.
Welcome to Roy’s India, my dear — and what an India this is.
…the right not to be a perfect mother, for the right not to be a nice, obedient woman, and most of all for the right not to be a fucking bore like you. (135)
She’s in a white salwar and a soft, oversize tea-brown T-shirt. And her high-top basketball shoes…I stand on the shore and look at her through the binoculars I’ve made with my hands. (326)
About the reviewer: L. Lois lives in an urban hermitage where trauma-informed themes flow during walks by the ocean. She is pivoting into her grandmother-era, figuring out why her bevy of adult children don’t have babies, while prioritizing writing, publication, and arts-related volunteerism. Her poems have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, The Brussels Review, Washington Square Review, Hanging Loose Magazine, Chiron Review, Poetry Breakfast, among other publications. L. Lois is an Associate Member of the League of Canadian Poets, is part of the editorial team at Quibble Lit, and freelances as a business feature writer and poetry workshop leader. A selection of her published work is linked at https://poeting.my.canva.site.