Author(s): Reshmi C R

Abstract: Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025) is Arundhati Roy’s first full-length autobiographical work since The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in 1997. The memoir reconstructs Roy’s complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, the Kerala-based educator and women’s rights activist whose 1986 legal victory secured equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women. This review examines the memoir along four interlocking axes: the emotional architecture of the mother–daughter bond, the feminist and social commentary woven through the narrative, the lyrical and non-linear style that mirrors the workings of memory, and the larger ethical questions about love, grief, and inheritance that the book raises. The paper argues that Roy refuses both hagiography and bitter indictment, instead modelling a mature mode of remembrance in which admiration, resentment, and tenderness coexist. The memoir is read here as both an intimate elegy and an act of cultural critique, extending Roy’s long-standing engagement with patriarchy, class, and political violence into the register of personal life writing.

Keywords: Arundhati Roy, feminism, Kerala, memoir, mother-daughter relationship.

Article Info: Received: 17 Apr 2026; Received in revised form: 14 May 2026; Accepted: 18 May 2026; Available online: 21 May 2026

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.113.26