Non-fiction
Becoming by Tessa Moriarty
A review of Mary Mother Comes To Me, by Arundhati Roy (Penguin, 2025).
How is it that a cruel, domineering woman commanded so much respect and attention? How is it that a daughter – the recipient of life-long humiliation and aggression towards her, finds space in her heart, not only to admire, but to love her perpetrator – her mother? How indeed. All through this magnificent memoir, I wondered about these questions, and the answers I believe – at least to how Arundhati withstood her mother – are in the ways in which she learns to reconcile and manage her mother’s behaviour and who she – Arundhati Roy – becomes.
‘It was almost as though for her to shine her light on her students and give them all she had, we – he and I’ (Arundhati and her brother) – ‘had to absorb her darkness,’ (p.53). ‘Today, though, I am grateful for that gift of darkness. I learned to keep it close, to map it, to sift through its shades, to stare at it until it gave up its secrets. It turned out to be a route to freedom, too,’ (p.53).
In her freedom – that she finds within herself and in her life away from her mother, Arundhati is accepting and forgiving. And her writing about it – is eloquent, sharp, honest. In part, it is her writing that saves her, that becomes her.
Mary Roy, an activist, and educator is known as Mrs Roy, even to her children – Arundhati and Lalit Kumar Christopher Roy. But Mary Roy makes her children pay emotionally and physically for the extreme dysfunction in her own personality. For her disowned fears, resentment, grandiosity, and anger with the world. What she despises in others, and cannot accept within herself, she takes out on her children. They are beaten and severely admonished – not just for what they apparently do or fail to do, but because they are easy targets.
But Arundhati and her brother have no choice but to take their mother’s cruelty. To take it in and find ways to manage the darkness and rage. To their absolute credit, they rise from their mother’s narcissistic behaviour, to become great people in their own right – despite her, perhaps because of her, but also because of themselves.
Is it because Mary Roy achieves so much in her life that her bad behaviour is swept aside, swallowed? Is it that she uses knowledge, wit, and arrogance to beat the system? Are these the redeeming factors that keep her children connected to her (despite the years Arundhati didn’t speak to her mother or visit her) and make them proud of her? Or is it simply because she is their mother – to whom they must be loyal, and this is a tie that cannot be easily severed?
Mother Mary Comes To Me makes you think about mothers and mothering.
It makes you think about your own mother, your childhood, and the mother you are or want to be. It makes you think about family and ways of being and behaving in families. Blood is indeed thicker than water. But when blood is full of toxins, it can poison. But Arundhati is not venomous. She is generous. Generous with her mother and generous with readers of her memoir. As she takes on a lively journey through the harsh and sometimes funny events of childhood, her university days, her coming of age and the significant relationships that sustain her away from her mother – we are with her all the way. She writes articulately about the political and religious unrest in India. She gives us history and geography lessons about her beloved country. She shows us how courageous she – much like her mother – is. Prepared to stick her neck out for what she believes. And she writes with love, humour, and affection about the many people and characters in her life, including her uncle and her mischievous father.
But she also takes us up the mountains and through the valleys of her writing process.
But she also takes us up the mountains and through the valleys of her writing process. We travel the success of her fictional novels God of Small Things (Booker Prize Winner in 1997) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (long listed for the Booker in 2017). She is frank and humble about the fortune from her writing. Again generous, both in kind and in spirit with the earnings she receives. Throughout the book, she takes us into her internal world, her makings. She gives us herself; she shows us her mother, her brother, her father. Those close to her. We feel her courage, her resilience, and we see the breadth of her writing skill.
This book is not just about the complex relationship between mother and daughter, it is about becoming.
This book is a must read, particularly if you have read Arundhati’s fiction, because it gives context to both novels. This book is not just about the complex relationship between mother and daughter, it is about becoming – Arundhati’s becoming. Her rich inner and outer worlds. How and who she finds herself to be. And this book is not all gloom and doom. There is relief, a lightness, a gratitude. Arundhati brings a humour to her writing that perhaps helps her (and the reader) manage the outrage and the despair of parts of her story.
As a baby-writer, this book inspires me to write more about the push-pull with my own late mother and the ways in which I too took a lot into me from her, that actually did not belong.
