What readers think of Mother Mary Comes to Me, plus links to write your own review.

4.5?s
Mother Mary Comes To Me is a memoir by award-winning, bestselling Indian author, Arundhati Roy which, she says, was prompted by the confusing emotions she experienced on the death of her mother, Mary Roy. When she starts writing, she soon realizes that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination – and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which”.

It takes only a few quotes to understand what an unusual upbringing Mary Roy inflicted on her son and daughter, and the long-lasting effects that had. She started a school, and was much loved by her students, but “It was almost as though for her to shine a light on her students and give them all she had, we – he and I – had to absorb her darkness.”

Arundhati observes “The land of infanticide and female foeticide, in which millions of daughters are done away with even before they are born, and some just after. Sometimes my mother behaved as though all of this was my brother’s fault. Because he was the only man she could reach, the only man she could punish for the sins of the world. The way she was with him has queered and complicated my view of feminism for ever, filled it with caveats.”

And yet “Between her bouts of rage and increasingly physical violence, Mrs Roy told her daughter that if she put her mind to it, she could be anything she wanted to be.”

They say that the best writing comes from authors who write what they know, and many aspects of, and incidents in, Roy’s childhood appear in her powerful, soul-searing The God of Small Things. “What is double-love divides by triple-my-size multiplied by free tickets divided by careless words?” sounds exactly like something that would come out of seven-year-old Rahel’s mouth.

The success of publication changed her life, but “I knew that fame could end up being a form of captivity, too. Also, I still hadn’t lost that very real, very tangible feeling I had carried around since I was a child – the feeling that every time I was applauded, someone else, someone quiet, was being beaten in another room.” A revelation.