Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy review brave and absorbing

"Twelve minutes into an interview with Allen Ginsberg for the BBC's Face to Face, Jeremy Isaacs asks him about the extraordinary long poem he wrote about his mother: What was the effect on you of living with a mother who was mad? Ginsberg's answer, mildly inflected by a laugh, is: It gave me a great sort of tolerance for eccentric behaviour. Arundhati Roy, whose memoir is partly an account of her life with her mother Mary Roy, might recognise this insight."

"Arguably, all mothers appear to their children as mad: madness here meaning an unbounded force, at odds with what society imagines normal parenting to consist of. The manifestations of this madness are as disparate as those of love, and these two aspects the abnormal, the overbearing, and the protective, the nurturing can be, in our mothers, intimately intertwined (She was my shelter and my storm, writes Roy)."

"Mary Roy was a kind of visionary, but she seemed to drive people around her mad, as well as being frequently driven mad by them. A Christian from Kerala, she escaped her parents by marrying a member of the Bengali bourgeoisie, known to his friends as Micky Roy, before leaving him when he became an alcoholic, a Nothing Man. She took her children, Arundhati and her brother Lalith, to a cottage that belonged to our maternal grandfather in Tamil Nadu."

Arundhati Roy grew up with a mother, Mary Roy, whose visionary and eccentric behavior shaped family life. Ginsberg’s observation that a mad mother gives tolerance for eccentric behaviour is echoed in Roy’s account. Maternal madness is portrayed as an unbounded force, often at odds with societal norms, yet intimately entwined with love, protection, and nurture. Mary Roy fled an oppressive family, married and left an alcoholic husband, and moved her children between homes in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. She confronted community inheritance laws that denied daughters property, experienced repeated familial conflicts, and sought independence for her family.

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