Arundhati Roy’s coruscating new memoir centers her tumultuous relationship with her mother Mary Roy, a brilliant but volatile pathbreaker the acclaimed novelist calls “my mother, my gangster...my shelter and my storm.”

In “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” the Booker Prize winner (for “The God of Small Things”) unpacks memories of her childhood and family in a series of nearly cinematic scenes, dense with the lyrical language, deep empathy and fierce social critique that have made Roy’s novels international bestsellers.

She begins with her own return to Kerala, India, in 2022 to attend her mother’s funeral. She’s overwhelmed by her emotions — “wrecked, heart-smashed” — although her brother, LKC, expresses surprise: “I don’t understand your reaction. She treated nobody as badly as she treated you.”

Roy then moves back in time to another journey, that of her mother, whom she refers to throughout as “Mrs. Roy,” leaving her alcoholic husband in the early 1960s. With 3-year-old Roy and 4-year-old LKC in tow, she starts a new life as a single mother, an independent woman at a time when this was very rare.

Mrs. Roy seeks to claim a share of her deceased father’s property in Kerala, despite laws that prevented Christian women from inheriting from their fathers. Roy clearly admires her mother’s force of will, as she “squats” on the family land, eventually founding a school there, and hires lawyers to take her fight to the courts.

Amidst these societal battles, Mrs. Roy takes out her frustrations on her children, causing lifelong psychic scars: “It could have been her illness, or the medication, but she became extremely bad-tempered and began to hit us often.”

Roy flees home at 16 to attend university in Delhi, studying architecture. After graduating, she is cast in a film that leads to a successful career in screenwriting. She avoids contact with her mother for seven years. However, when Roy begins working on her first novel, she is inspired by her mother’s battles and personality. After “God of Small Things” wins the Booker, Roy, becomes a celebrity at 36.

It’s clear Roy has inherited her mother’s fighting spirit. She details her work on causes as diverse as environmental protests, trekking with guerillas through the jungle to report on government-sponsored violence and denouncing caste discrimination, anti-Muslim riots and rising Hindu nationalism. She is even sentenced briefly to prison for “contempt of court” for her outspokenness.

Meanwhile, after decades of court battles, Mrs. Roy succeeds in changing inheritance laws for Christian women in Kerala, a feat for the history books which brings the mother fame and notoriety in equal measure.

Her school succeeds as well. “On top of all her other talents, Mrs. Roy had a head for business. Like a local mafia don, she had begun to buy up the plots around her campus,” Roy writes. With the new land, she builds “an auditorium, a swimming pool, small apartments for visiting teachers, and dormitories for senior girls.”

By book’s end, Roy can take stock of the contradictions in her mother’s life — her triumphs, her passionate advocacy for her students, her “soul-crushing meanness” — and still love her dearly. She describes gathering with extended family and former students for Mrs. Roy’s funeral: “We sat with her all night, telling stories about her that made us laugh and cry.”

“Mother Mary Comes to Me” may pack the same “heart-smashing” wallop on readers. It is a masterpiece of memoir writing, a rich tapestry of memory, reckoning and longing.

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Mother Mary Comes to Me

By: Arundhati Roy.

Publisher: Scribner, 330 pages.

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