A memoir and memorial all in one.

Nothing could have prepared me for the many lives Arundathi Roy has lived. It’s amazing that she’s still standing, intact, after what can only be described as a relentlessly trying few decades on this earth.

When I first picked up the copy in a bookstore late last year, I thought fondly of her visit to South Africa in 2018. Sitting in a packed auditorium at UCT, I had taken the day off and readied myself to be awed for the two hours we had with her. See, Roy is somewhat of a personal hero to me. Her words and mind have helped me sharpen my own, see and experience the world differently.

Reading this memoir, something she said in that setting, turned over frequently as I realised just how much of her fiction has been informed by her very life.

“Only fiction can tell the truth… it has its ear and heart very close to the ground. Fiction is years of listening and travelling and sweating that experience out in ink.” Roy, August 13, 2018

From the early pages of her latest work, through to the last, some 400 pages later, one can’t help but be stunned and struck by just how closely fiction mimics reality for her. To now know that Velutha from The God of Small Things, was based on a real man, made my whole year. He remains one of my favourite literary characters to date.

What hit me first and has stayed with me since is the indelible marks our parents leave on us. Regardless of their intent, the impact of their actions seeps into our marrow in confounding and lasting ways. Roy’s relationship with her mother comes across as being rooted in something like love, fear, jealousy, disdain and deep affinity all rolled into one. There’s an understanding on the page that this toxic and at times abusive cocktail cannot be survived, at close proximity at least, so Roy and her brother run as soon as they are able, but the taste of it, no matter how bitter, is something that stays with them. Something you crave even, for her anyway.

She manages to write about both her parents with care and admiration, despite the lasting and lingering pain either has inflicted. My assumption around that is the way Roy considers herself an imperfect person, she extends that grace to her close relations with a knowing that in the far reaches of any given relationship, love exists. Which to me harks back to the title of the memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, yes, it’s a clever play and shoutout to her obsession with The Beatles, but on a deeper level I think it’s an acknowledgement of the acceptance of what their relationship was and wasn’t (or could not be). That while she describes her mother as her shelter and her storm in the book’s early pages, she has chosen to point us to the house and not just the impending weather. Her mother, like so many others, defied and defeated incredible odds to build the life she did. She fought tooth and nail for everything she had, and therein lies the affinity I pointed to earlier.

It’s an almost unbelievable read, Roy’s life (to me) is characterised by extremes which mould her into the rebel, vagabond, artist and fighter I have come to love. Her convictions are firmly rooted in her experiences and the unwillingness to look away in the face of personal and collective injustice.

As always, with anything she writes, it drips with imagery and perfect prose which force you read and re-read some passages over and over in a desperate attempt to commit their meaning to memory.

I think one would struggle to read this if you aren’t already a fan of her’s or at the very least intrigued by her and her work. If you are, highly recommend it. Best bits below.