Mother Mary comes to me

Booker Prize--winning novelist Roy (The Ministry of Utmost Happiness) delivers a bracing memoir that traces her thorny relationship with her mother, teacher and social activist Mary Roy. The author was "heart-smashed" by her mother's death in 2022, despite Mary's sometimes "soul-crushing meanness." In the aftermath, Roy was moved to examine the forces that made Mary tick. With characteristically elegant prose ("My older sibling was a boy, and my younger sibling was a school. There was never any doubt about who our mother's favorite child was"), Roy balances an account of Mary's impressive résumé as an educator and advocate for women's property rights with a portrait of her emotional volatility. Raising Roy and her brother as a single mother in northeastern India, Mary was often cold and verbally abusive, insisting her children call her "Mrs. Roy." Severely asthmatic, constantly aware of her own mortality, and sometimes openly resentful of motherhood, Mary makes for an endlessly fascinating subject. Neither too bleak nor overly conciliatory, the account does justice to often-irresolvable feelings of familial ambivalence. It's a welcome addition to the shelf of memoirs about difficult moms. Agent: Lisette Verhagen, Peters, Fraser, and Dunlop. (Sept.)

A daughter's memories. Booker Prize--winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy, who raised her two children alone after divorcing her ne'er-do-well husband, was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. In a patriarchal society that oppressed women socially, economically, and legally, she fought to make a life for herself and her family, working tirelessly to become "the owner, headmistress, and wild spirit" of an astoundingly successful school. The schoolchildren respectfully called her Mrs. Roy, and so did Arundhati and her brother. To escape her mother's demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi, where she was studying architecture. After a brief marriage to a fellow student, she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer: screenplays, essays, and at last the novel she titledThe God of Small Things. The book became a sensation, earning her money and fame, as well as notoriety: She faced charges of "obscenity and corrupting public morality." Arundhati sets her life in the context of India's roiling politics, of which she became an outspoken critic. For many years, she writes, "I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I traveled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-warrior." Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter's life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. "I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her." Without her, "I didn't make sense to myself anymore." Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love. An intimate, stirring chronicle. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.