What’s missing in Arundhati Roy’s memoir: A daughter’s rage and true forgiveness

Like many others, I found myself devouring Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. In recent years, Roy has rarely written such charming prose. Her sentences are clear as water. They flow with the freedom of a young river, as she recalls her unusual childhood – lived not like normal “mummy-daddy” kids but on the edge of respectability, perhaps not very far from privilege.

Her grief at the death of her mother sets Arundhati Roy off on this book. The remarkable Mary Roy, educationist and institution builder and slayer of patriarchal laws, is the subject of the first 100-odd disarming pages. But the title is a red herring; MR was no pious Mother Mary. Nor is this a misty-eyed elegy.

Wrath against motherhood

Mother Mary Comes to Me is Roy’s attempt to reach a reckoning with her mother’s rage, which bruised and scarred her children, to find a way to understand it. “Once I learned to protect myself (somewhat) from its soulcrushing meanness, I grew fascinated by her wrath against motherhood,” she writes.

I stopped at that phrase. I recognised it.

Motherhood is unacknowledged and unpaid labour. It damages women’s bodies and holds them back. Mothers are often poor, or made poorer – in time, mobility, opportunity – by having and caring for...

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