Carly Tagen-Dye in People Magazine:
Roy, who is the author of novels like Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, had a “complex” relationship with Mary, after running away at age 18. The author says she left her mother “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her,” per the memoir’s synopsis. Mary, a women’s rights activist, was best known for winning a 1986 Supreme Court lawsuit that granted Christian women in India equal inheritance rights.
When Mary died in 2022, Roy was “more than a little ashamed” by her response to the news, and turned to the page to process her feelings. Mother Mary Comes to Me tells the story of Roy’s childhood in Kerala, India, where she was raised, as well as her path toward becoming the acclaimed author she is today. The memoir is “a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother,” per the book’s synopsis.
More here.
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