Mother Mary Comes to Me
Mary Roy won a landmark case in India Supreme Court and was, by her daughter account, impossible to live with. Arundhati Roy writes her anyway.
Roy’s memoir of her mother Mary Roy, who won a landmark inheritance case in India’s Supreme Court and was, by her daughter’s account, impossible to live with. A book about family, formidable women, and what success does to a person who set out to refuse it, written in a register far more exposed than her fiction.
Recommended by 2 People
Tyler Cowen
Well-written, but at some point I started wondering why I should care. OK, Mama was a pain in the ass, but then what? You had to take care of her when she was old. I guess I prefer whaling tales?
Maria Popova
Arundhati Roy is one such modern patron saint, and she takes up the complicated question of success in her exquisite memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me (public library) — what success means and looks like in the deepest sense, how its shallow metrics can turn a person into “a cold silver figurine with a cold silver heart,” why “making friends with defeat” is “the very opposite of accepting it” and so-called failure might actually be worth striving for.
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