Arundhati Roy: “I didn’t want my mother to destroy me, but I didn’t want to destroy her either”

No matter the kind of relationship you had with your mother growing up, the Memoirs of Arundhati Roy will unlock something primal in you. Some chapters will make you want to call your mom and let her unload with you with abandonment – no matter what she says as long as you can hear the sound of her voice. Other chapters will have the impression of drowning under the weight of all the words you have never told him. Whatever the side you fall on, Mother Marie comes to me (Published by Penguin Random House India) is a kinship book: between a stubborn mother and her inflexible daughter; Between a brutally honest author and his impatient readers.

Mary Roy, founder of the prestigious Pallikoodam school in Kottayam, activist for women’s rights and persistent women who fought and won a trial of the Supreme Court against the successive law of the Syrian Kerala Malabar Kerala Malabar, the last book of its author of its author. When she died in 2022 at the age of 89, the form of Roy’s own memories began to train. But because a large part of whom is the author of Booker, aged 61, is inextricably linked to his mother, Mother Marie comes to me ends up being the memories of the late Mary as that of her daughter.

When Roy appears on Zoom, his gray curls are wet – whether they are showering or a walk in the rains of Delhi, I don’t know. In any case, asking Arundhati Roy on time feels both out of words and irreverent. Instead, I embark on a passionate preamble on the way the book looked like a sweet breeze sometimes caressing my cheek, and others, like a gigantic brick hitting me square in the face. I fight on mothers who demand too much and the girls who leave – both physically and emotionally. How to write on a mother, I ask, who abandoned her young daughter by the road when she failed to dazzle a stranger with her intelligence, and came back to recover it after nightfall? How to write about a mother who has registered in a hospital to read her daughter’s first book because she was worried about the way she could be represented in her pages? “Did you have the impression that it was a rage book?” Roy interrupts me, not mean. “I see it as a complicated love book. I didn’t want my mother to destroy me, but I didn’t want to destroy her either. ”