Mother Mary Comes to Me

De: Arundhati Roy

Narrado por: Arundhati Roy

A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that traces the complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life both as a woman and a writer.

Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”

“Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022 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.” And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and essays, through today.

With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.

©2025 Arundhati Roy (P)2025 Simon & Schuster Audio

Story, Language, Politics and Spirit.

Gorgeous Story, Narration, Spiritual and Political Economy. She is brilliant and totally human. I am honored to read her.

Enlighten and affirming

beautiful, honest and funny, spoke to all of us who have a complex relationship of deep love and admiration and total bewilderment and sometimes angry relationships with our parents

this memoir will stay with you forever

You live the raw emotions with all its tears, pain and the ecstasy as if you lived inside of the writer's heart.

and I still love her desperately

A beautifully written and told memoir of almost unbearable social and personal abuse, from the deeply misogynistic culture in which Roy grew up to the troubled mother who showed affection with constant tongue lashings and belittlement.

Perhaps the pain is the source and wellspring of Roy's genius as a writer. still, it's an awfully high price to pay.

Courage

It had the integrity of a life fully lived. A full range of emotions and experiences beautifully inscribed.

Beautiful beyond belief.

My title says it all. Moving, magnificently written, a treasure to be sure. Read it.

Gorgeous memoir and tribute to her mother

A sparkling gem of a book, perfectly and lovingly narrated by Roy herself. A moving portrait of a complicated mother and daighter relationship.

Ode to Mart

Loved loved lovedddddd it! I just couldn’t stop! The two days I forgot everything and just journeyed with the Mighty Mary Roy (a force of nature) and Arundhati. So happy it was narrated by the author! It was a treat! thank you!!! Another special thanks to Mayank Austen Soofi, I so wanted to see the grove and I knew that he would have posted something and I found picture of it on his facebook. It’s as beautiful as I had imagined it. What a fitting tribute!

Raw, Real, and Bare.

Finished in less than 24 hours, just as it became available. A bittersweet mother-daughter story where the bitter is aggressively harsh, but that’s what makes the rare sweet moments feel all the more earned. What makes this memoir remarkable is the lens through which Arundhati Roy sees the world; brutally honest, unsparing of life and, most strikingly herself.
At times it leaves you breathless, as her insights and mature conclusions in the most complex situations seem to come from a rare kind of wisdom, even when she’s a child. Her passion for freedom and for life, pulses through every page and it lingers as an invitation for us the readers to live more fearlessly, and more ruthlessly honest in our own.

Raw emotions

You have to listen to the very last second of this book. It is so worth it.