Mother Mary Comes to Me

Booker Prize–winning novelist Roy (The Ministry of Utmost Happiness) delivers a bracing memoir that traces her thorny relationship with her mother, teacher and social activist Mary Roy. The author was “heart-smashed” by her mother’s death in 2022, despite Mary’s sometimes “soul-crushing meanness.” In the aftermath, Roy was moved to examine the forces that made Mary tick. With characteristically elegant prose (“My older sibling was a boy, and my younger sibling was a school. There was never any doubt about who our mother’s favorite child was”), Roy balances an account of Mary’s impressive résumé as an educator and advocate for women’s property rights with a portrait of her emotional volatility. Raising Roy and her brother as a single mother in northeastern India, Mary was often cold and verbally abusive, insisting her children call her “Mrs. Roy.” Severely asthmatic, constantly aware of her own mortality, and sometimes openly resentful of motherhood, Mary makes for an endlessly fascinating subject. Neither too bleak nor overly conciliatory, the account does justice to often-irresolvable feelings of familial ambivalence. It’s a welcome addition to the shelf of memoirs about difficult moms. Agent: Lisette Verhagen, Peters, Fraser, and Dunlop. (Sept.)