Booker Prize–winning author Arundhati Roy, who hails from Kerala, has released her first memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. The book offers an intimate portrait of her late mother, Mary Roy—a pioneering educationist and activist who fought historic battles for women’s rights in Kerala.
Mary Roy, who founded the famous Corpus Christi School (later Pallikoodam) in Kottayam, became a national figure after her landmark legal battle that secured equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women. She was also a formidable presence in Arundhati Roy’s life—nurturing, inspiring, yet often strict and unyielding.
The memoir captures this complex relationship. As the Washington Post observed: “Roy paints a poignant and complex portrait of a woman who was both shelter and storm, a teacher and a tyrant, whose love and authority shaped her daughter’s destiny.”
The Guardian called it “brave and absorbing… a reckoning with a mother whose contradictions left both scars and strength.”
For Kerala readers, the memoir resonates deeply: it is not just the story of a famous writer and her mother, but also of a society in transition—where women like Mary Roy broke barriers and inspired new generations.
Reflecting on her mother’s influence, Roy notes that her celebrated novel, The God of Small Things, was rooted in the family and cultural world of Kerala. As The New Yorker writes, “This is less a memoir than a meditation on how a mother’s oppressive love and fierce independence became inseparable from the writer’s own voice.”
Mother Mary Comes to Me is ultimately a love letter to a mother Arundhati once fled, yet never stopped writing about. For Kerala, it is a reminder that its cultural soil has produced voices of international resonance, shaped by struggles at home.
