Arundhati Roy's memoir traces her fraught, intense bond with her mother Mary Roy, a strong-willed school founder in Kerala, from a chaotic childhood in Ayemenem and Kottayam through Roy's own path into architecture, screenwriting, activism, and the writing of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. The book closes with Roy reflecting on her mother's death and imagining her still walking the shoreline of memory.
Books mentioned in Mother Mary Comes to Me (9)
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy: “That's what I said at the front of my first novel, The God of Small Things, which I dedicated to her.”
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy: “How else can it be that like the characters in my second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, I, too, am now the caretaker of a sort of grave...”
Mister Johnson by Joyce Cary: “He said the story was loosely based on a novel set in colonial Nigeria called Mister Johnson by Joyce Cary and that I was on no account to read it because he didn't want me to be influenced by it.”
Ways of Seeing by John Berger: “So many of us had grown up reading his Ways of Seeing.”
My Story by Kamala Das: “Kamala Das had shocked Kerala with her book My Story, published in 1973, which was candid and unapologetic about sexual intimacy.”
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie: “the Congress government had banned Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses and reversed a progressive Supreme Court judgment...”
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: “I showed her a picture of Heathcliff lying on Cathy's grave from an old illustrated edition of Wuthering Heights.”
Ulysses by James Joyce: “Isaac's sentences purloined from Joyce's Ulysses – 'Bel-luomo rises from the bed of his wife's lover's wife, the kerchiefed housewife is astir' – streaked like comets across my reading sky.”
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani: “I often think of sending him a copy of Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.”