Very often, when writer Arundhati Roy speaks about life, it doesn’t feel overly confessional or distant. It sits somewhere in between, where memories are revisited with utmost care and honesty. That tone carries over into her writing as well, as she moves easily between the personal and the political without forcing neat conclusions. And her latest book, Mother Mary Comes to Me, follows that same rhythm.
Shaped by a childhood that was at once extraordinary and unstable, anchored by Mary Roy, her mother, who was both her force of liberation and contradiction, who she calls ‘both storm and shelter’, is at the heart of the book. “My mother taught me to be free and then raged against my freedom. She taught me to write and then resented the writer I became. It was up to me to accept the gifts and refuse the rage,” she says, during a recent book discussion held at St. Joseph’s Boys’ High School on Museum Road.
In her memoir, Roy does not attempt to reconcile these contradictions. Instead, she chooses what to carry forward. She replaces the bitterness with a kind of clarity that directly feeds into her writing. “I actually don’t have that bitterness. I left home at 16, and that distance shaped who I became. I told myself to write what I couldn’t forget. That became the book,” she says.
Even within this landscape of violence and contradiction, humour persists in her writing, as one can see. Whether recounting her mother’s unconventional parenting methods or absurdly tender memories – like being sent to fetch bras across continents, Roy returns repeatedly to laughter as a form of survival in her book. “There is nothing worth fighting for if there’s nothing to laugh at. Learning to laugh is a militant act,” she notes, as laughter or humour becomes a way of refusing despair, of maintaining agency in the face of it.
If her personal narrative resists a simplification, so too does her position within the literary world. With a Booker Prize under her belt, she shares that she would like to remain wary of labels, particularly that of success. “I don’t think of myself as a successful writer in any simple sense. Look at the people I write about – battered, broken, killed, genocided – they are still being broken and erased,” she says, pointing towards the metrics that sit uneasily alongside the realities she documents, adding, “I have a slight repulsion towards success. Those who strut around with it are often the most boring.”
For Roy, writing is not an act that begins at the desk but one that runs parallel to living. “Writing is almost like breathing. It’s something I do all the time. There was a part of me taking the hits and a part of me taking notes. I was always writing my way out of what I was trapped in,” she explains.
At the same time, she insists on emotional honesty as the starting point of any writing, especially with the current landscape of war and violence across the world. “Literature cannot be separated from the world it lives in,” she says, adding, “You can’t write what you don’t feel.” Whether political or personal, she believes the difference lies in urgency and not particularly in truth. “When I write political essays, something in my body changes. There is an urgency that comes from confronting what is happening around us,” says the 64-year-old author.