Mother Mary comes to me
(Book)

"Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy's first work of memoir, is an intimate and disconcerting, yet surprisingly funny, chronicle of the relationship between two women, a schoolteacher and a writer, who happen to be mother and daughter. Roy writes with a novelist's unsettling ability to be inside her own story as well as outside it, simultaneously child and adult, attached and detached, protagonist and narrator. She describes how she came to be the writer she is, shaped by circumstance but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, whom she describes as 'my shelter and my storm.' 'Heart-smashed' by Mary's death, yet puzzled and 'more than a little ashamed' by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, 'not because I didn't love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.' With the scale, sweep, and depth of Roy's novels, and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace--a memoir like no other.." Provided by publisher.