No longer mum about mum: Arundhati Roy

The Indian author's first memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me is a complex portrait of her mother, feminist icon Mary Roy

- Shawn Hoo

Feted as a revolutionary feminist who struck down a sexist inheritance law in her native Kerala, Mary Roy was tempestuous at home. She divorced her "nothing man" of a husband, flew into a violent rage with her son and coerced obedience from her daughter by crying asthma.

When she died at age 88 in 2022, her daughter the Booker Prize winning author Arundhati Roy felt humiliated at the intensity of her grief and was in ruins. Her brother, on other hand, was jovial and gregarious.

Roy wanted to speak to her mother in a way she never could have: "This book is that conversation I never had. Well, she doesn't have to listen, but I have to conduct it, you know?"

The 63-year-old is on tour in London for her first memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me (2025) when she speaks to The Sunday Times: "What is true is that someone who couldn't breathe used up a lot of my oxygen. The fact that she was such a huge presence in my life I had to manage - not necessarily a loving presence is what devastated me when she died. It suddenly made me feel: 'Why am I this complicated person?'"

The bully that Mary Roy was paradoxically gave the younger Roy a sense of freedom from patriarchal India, "this land of son-worshippers... of female foeticide". She writes: "In that conservative, stifling little South Indian town, where, in those days, women were only allowed the option of cloying virtue or its affectation my mother conducted herself with the edginess of a gangster."