Mother Mary Comes to Me

De: Arundhati Roy

Narrado por: Arundhati Roy

Named One of The New York Times Book Review’s Top Ten Books of the Year

Winner of the the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography | Finalist for the Kirkus Prize | Nominated for the Women's Prize for Nonfiction

One of the best-reviewed books of the year, a raw and deeply moving memoir that “pulses with compassion and moral outrage” (The Wall Street Journal) from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that traces her complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life both as a woman and a writer.

In this, her first work of memoir, Arundhati Roy writes, “Perhaps even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject.”

Mother Mary Comes to Me, is an intimate chronicle, “full of precise imagery and blistering emotional intelligence” (The Washington Post), of the relationship between two women, a school teacher and a writer, who happen to be mother and daughter. Roy writes with a novelist’s unsettling ability to be inside her own story as well as outside it, simultaneously child and adult, attached and detached, protagonist and narrator. She describes how she came to be the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”

“Heart-smashed” by Mary’s death, 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.”

With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me “builds worlds that are revolutionary, made from the darkness that she spins into purpose” (The New Republic). An ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—Mother Mary Comes to Me is a memoir like no other.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"This haunting and tender memoir is an insightful exploration of a mother-daughter relationship and India’s culture."

Courage

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

Ernest and explosive

I’ve not felt so exhilarated about a book. The trauma, honesty, passion, courage to break norms, and nonconformity to stereotypes were remarkable. It felt as though Arundhati started writing with the simplicity of how her life began, and the language became more complex and layered as her story progressed — reflecting her journey.

Beautiful

I loved the writing and hearing the author reading. A great memoir. I loved it.

So terrible, yet so touching

Roy’s memoir took me on a vast journey I could not have imagined, all the while threading the needle with strands of love which were interwoven into a majestic tapestry of one woman’s life.

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.