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‘I love that she was not good’: Writer Arundhati Roy on the mother who made and unmade her
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Indian writer Arundhati Roy's first memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me (2025) recalls her mother, who was hailed as a feminist trailblazer, and was mercurial and cruel at home.
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SINGAPORE – Feted as a revolutionary feminist who struck down a sexist inheritance law in her native Kerala, Mary Roy was tempestuous at home. She divorced her “nothing man” of a husband, flew into a violent rage with her son and coerced obedience from her daughter by crying asthma.
When she died at age 88 in 2022, her daughter – the Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy – felt humiliated at the intensity of her grief and was in ruins. Her brother, on other hand, was jovial and gregarious.
