Returning to Arundhati Roy, With More Years and Fewer Illusions

I knew Arundhati Roy first as a name. The Indian author who wrote The God of Small Things. A book my sister, who has always been more attuned to Indian literature than I ever was, had once recommended, well not once, on many occasions. I didn’t pick it up out of urgency or curiosity. I picked it up way later, in early 2018, to impress a girl. Some books enter your life without ceremony and end up staying far longer than the reason you picked them up.

That novel pulled me in completely. The story unfolded with emotional precision. Through family, love, and loss, it exposed how caste, class, and social rules embed themselves into childhood and shape people long before they have the language to name what’s happening to them. Arundhati trusted the reader to sit with discomfort, to experience history as something lived rather than explained. I came away convinced of her literary skill. Then I moved on. That was the only book of hers I had read.

Mother Mary Comes to Me brought me back.

Reading it felt eye-opening. Her experience growing up in India as a woman sharpened my understanding. What stayed with me was how personal the book felt. Arundhati places those realities inside memory and family, inside the long process of becoming herself. The book reads like a return to old ground, walked with more awareness.

Her relationship with her mother sits at the centre of everything. It’s complicated, unresolved, and deeply formative. At one point, Arundhati explains that she moved away because she wanted to keep loving her mother. There’s something deeply human about recognising distance as an act of care. Separation, in this context, becomes a way of protecting love rather than abandoning it. That idea reframes the entire relationship and gives it a kind of clarity that stayed with me long after I finished the book.

I didn’t see my own relationship with my mother reflected here or anything, and that never felt like a gap. A book doesn’t necessarily need to mirror your life to matter. Sometimes it just needs to show you how another life was shaped, honestly and without apology. And that's what I was seeking from this book.

What fascinated me most was seeing where Arundati's writing seems to come from. I’ve always believed that fiction carries lived experience inside it, even when imagination does the heavy lifting. Reading this memoir, I felt like I was glimpsing the source. The way she constructs sentences. The patience she has with contradiction. The willingness to sit with complexity without rushing towards resolution. It became easier to understand how her voice was formed.

The book moves through memory, circling childhood, womanhood, and inheritance. Inheritance here feels emotional rather than material. Arundati appears deeply aware that who she became is inseparable from her mother’s presence in her life. That awareness runs through the book without sentimentality or performance.

This memoir left me with understanding and respect. A clearer sense of the forces that shaped her, and how those forces continue to echo through her work. After reading it, The God of Small Things feels connected to something deeper, rooted in lived experience rather than pure invention.

It’s strange to think that all of this began with a book I read to impress a girl. That moment feels distant now, almost irrelevant. What matters is that the writing stayed with me, and that years later, this memoir helped me understand why it did.