In her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy recounts how literary agent David Godwin flew from Britain to India in 1996 to offer a huge advance for her debut novel. Reading The God of Small Things, he said, “felt as though somebody had shot some heroin up my arm.”

This sensational image indicates the excitement and controversy that have always greeted a new book by Roy. Mother Mary Comes to Me is another literary shot in the arm from the Keralan author. It exemplifies how autobiography is fiction, fiction is autobiography, and each can jolt us out of humdrum everyday lives. The new memoir, like her novels, stirs personal history into broader social commentary about such issues as Big Dams and the Naxalite movement — while staying glossily commercial.

My column does not aim to review the autobiography, as that task is already assigned elsewhere in Dawn. I briefly trace how the book positions Roy as acolyte-turned-apostate daughter, as well as architect, actor and activist. From these entangled identities, I pull out a single strand: Roy as author.

This Künstlerroman element has been largely marginalised in reviews, which instead foreground Mary Roy the feminist icon and the two women’s loving but dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship. This is apt, as the often cruel parent is an important aspect flagged in the book’s title. Yet it overshadows Roy’s discussion of authorial formation.

In The God of Small Things, Roy suggests that dignity and hope reside in small things (including children) and the insights they yield. This idea chimes with the curiosity that draws readers into novels about characters that don’t exist.

Or do they? The borders between that novel and Roy’s memoir are porous. Ayemenem/Aymanam is her real childhood village, where she “shared secrets” with a squirrel and believed herself to be the owner of its “green river.” Chacko is entirely her exuberant uncle G. Isaac, who was decadently feudal despite his Marxism. (The novelist just fabricated his half-English daughter Sophie Mol.) Roy’s mother believed Ammu to be a flattering self-portrait. Even a minor character, the much-despised teacher Miss Mitten, crosses over. Both young Roy and one of her fictional twin counterparts, Estha, harness their neophyte creative skills to write of the Australian, “I think her gnickers are torn.”

This memoir will have academics poring over life-art connections for years to analyse the metafictional and intertextual components of Roy’s fiction.

As a child, Roy’s mother was “Mrs Roy” to her, since she was educated at the school Mary Roy founded and led as headmistress. Her education was Westernised but wide-ranging and literary. It took in canonical texts by Shakespeare and Kipling, the divisive modern classic Lolita, and blues-inflected protest songs by African American musicians.

Roy reflects that her strict, eccentric mother “taught me how to think, then raged against my thoughts. She taught me to be free, then raged against my freedom. She taught me to write and resented the author I became.” In this way, Roy’s upbringing was colonised: disciplined, cultivated and well-resourced within limits, yet constantly policing its inhabitants’ autonomy.

She rebelled, moving to Delhi for her studies during the mid-1970s. In India’s capital, she lived in artistic poverty and pot smoke, not speaking to Mrs Roy for seven years. Although her degree was in architecture, for her thesis she chose to write “about ‘non-citizens’ who live in the cracks of the city”, with only a cursory nod to architectural drawings.

Next, she fell into acting and production design, in such 1980s’ films as Massey Sahib and In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. On set, she fell in love with director Pradip Krishen. He would go on to become an authority on Indian trees, remain her longest-term life partner, and encourage her to become a writer.

It was writing for the movies that interested Roy but, more than that, she longed “to write the opposite of a screenplay.” Thoughts of the “Act of Literature” and a career as an author galvanised her:

“As a child, it’s all I ever thought I’d be. Nothing made me forget the world like reading did. Nothing made me think about the world like reading did. Nothing else filled me up. Nothing else emptied me out. Sentences and paragraphs would drift through my head like clouds.”

For Roy, literature is both refuge and engine. It gave her shelter and then hurtled her into a lifelong engagement with the world.

Drawing on her architectural training, Roy drafted her plans for The God of Small Things on the literal back of an envelope, before shutting herself away to write the novel. This cloistering affected her relationship with Pradip and his teenage daughters, but they were mostly supportive. With characteristic rigour and repetition, Roy depicts her ambition: “If I could describe my river, if I could describe the rain, if I could describe feeling in a way that you could see it, smell it, touch it, then I would consider myself a writer.”

Roy gives a rich sense of the activities needed to publish, promote and publicise a book in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These encompass literary awards (it was “thrilling” when Roy won the Booker Prize) and public events (she narrowly avoids an altercation between uncle and mother at one of her talks). Roy also addresses the difficult second album of writing a follow-up novel, calling The Ministry of Utmost Happiness a “conversation between graveyards” and a eulogy to Kashmir.

Roy states that her wider politics cannot be separated from her literary imagination, disagreeing with the tendency to partition her writing. Her friend John Berger, who supplied the epigraph for Roy’s memoir, was one of the few who didn’t “pit my fiction and non-fiction against each other as though they were antagonists.” This book breaks down the walls between her artistic and political imagination. It shows how Roy’s stories and her anti-capitalist, anti-casteist, pro-Indigenous, pro-Kashmiri politics are not rivals but pieces of the same jagged but unbroken puzzle.

Roy opposes old “stories that used fear to control us” to produce something subversive, humorous and open-ended. Her writing returns us to Godwin on books as a narcotic for the soul rather than opium of the people. Literature, Roy thinks, should be shocking but sustainable. So her memoir electrifies readers into a fugue-state awareness of Mother Earth, our own mothers and our relationships with them.

The columnist is a Professor of Global Literature at the University of York and author of five books.
Bluesky: @clarachambara

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 21st, 2025