Last summer, Arundhati Roy’s apartment in Delhi, India, was badly damaged by heavy rains that roll through the city each monsoon season and linger for months. “The water collected on the roof and it collapsed,” Roy says over Zoom from the apartment. “The ceiling fan broke, then the thermostat went off and the pipes blew.”
At the time, Roy was working on her new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, which examines her life and difficult relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a trailblazing educator and women’s rights activist who died in 2022, and who was often tyrannical and abusive. “When the ceiling fan fell I just took it as Mary Roy is watching me,” Roy says with a smile. “She returned to me as a poltergeist. I thought it was funny that she was still raging around me somehow. She’s always there.”
One of India’s most important and outspoken writers, Roy is the author of two bestselling novels—The God of Small Things, her 1997 debut, which won the Booker Prize, and 2017’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness—that together have sold more than eight million copies, according to Roy’s U.K. agent, Lisette Verhagen, of Peters Fraser + Dunlop, and have been translated into 40-plus languages. Roy’s also the author of numerous nonfiction works, including Walking with the Comrades, Capitalism: A Ghost Story, and My Seditious Heart, that tackle political, ecological, and social justice issues in India.
Roy—born Suzanna Arundhati Roy in 1959 in Shillong, in northeastern India—never intended to write a book like Mother Mary Comes to Me, which powerfully lays bare her private life and struggles. “I never, ever thought I’d write a memoir,” she says. But the death of her mother—whom Roy describes as having “the edginess of a gangster”—left her grief stricken and shaken. “I couldn’t write anything else. I didn’t have a choice.”
In her memoir, Roy opens up about her youth in Kerala, where her mother (who left Roy’s alcoholic father when the author and her brother were kids) ran a school. Roy recalls tiptoeing around the chronically asthmatic “Mrs. Roy,” as she sometimes refers to her, never knowing what might set her off and lead to a slap or verbal attack. She looks back on moving to Delhi as a teen, with a knife for protection, and dropping her first name; attending the School of Planning and Architecture from 1976 to 1981; and working at a magazine at the National Institute of Urban Affairs.
Roy also reflects on writing The God of Small Things, the book that made her rich; stepping away from fiction for two decades to write nonfiction; and navigating her nearly three-decade marriage to film director and writer Pradip Krishen, which ended in 2022. She also writes, in unflinching tones, about being sexually abused as a girl by an acquaintance of her family, and about having an abortion, without anesthesia, in her 20s.
“There’s not much about myself as a private person out there,” Roy says. “Fundamentally, the challenge was that I didn’t want to be selling some nice version of myself in a book. That was very important to me.”
Kathryn Belden, Roy’s editor at Scribner, praises the author for her ability to bring her skills as a novelist to her own story. “Mother Mary Comes to Me has the narrative energy of a novel, like the best of memoir does,” Belden says. “I was stopped in my tracks by Arundhati’s sentences so many times.”
The striking and friendly Roy calls her mother her “most enthralling subject,” a complex woman who rejected traditional notions of motherhood. “Trying to define motherhood is what’s so oppressive,” Roy says. “My mother was an airport with no runways.” A fighter throughout her days, Mary Roy famously waged and won a court battle in the 1980s that gave Christian women in Kerala inheritance rights to their fathers’ property—showing Roy what was possible when a person challenged the status quo.
It’s a message she took to heart. Over the years, Roy’s been in the crosshairs of India’s government more times than she can count.
In 1999 she released a controversial essay that criticized the government’s Narmada Dam Project and its impact on the environment
and local communities. And in 2010 she spent weeks living with Maoist guerillas in the forests of India, documenting how mining
and banking conglomerates were exploiting the population. She’s faced political attacks and threats of incarceration and, in 2024, was awarded the English PEN Pinter Prize for her uncompromising writing about global issues.
When Roy began publishing political essays, she was advised to stick to fiction. “Men would give me lectures about what subject I can write about, what tone I can take,” she says. “This is not literature,” she recalls being told about her nonfiction. “But, to me, it was literature.”
These days, she avoids literary festivals sponsored by corporations (“No thanks,” she declares) and puts portions of her royalties in a trust that’s used to help journalists, teachers, and activists in their work. And while she embraces activism, Roy doesn’t want to be labelled an activist. “I’m a writer, a novelist—nothing more,” she says. “To me, that’s the real challenge: how can you fuck the opposition with language?”
Writer Anthony Arnove, Roy’s U.S. agent and friend of 25 years, is the cofounder of Haymarket Books, which publishes much of Roy’s nonfiction, which he also edits. “Arundhati is a remarkable spirit—someone who’s fiercely committed to her ideas and independence,” Arnove says. “She’s not following a prescribed path. She’s guided by her inner lights.”
When Roy needs inspiration, she turns to music—the title of her memoir is a nod to the Beatles, one of her favorite bands. “The spirit of rock ’n’ roll sent me on my way and kept me going,” she says. A sense of humor is her sharpest weapon. “Half the time I’m just laughing at things. That’s saved me from so much.”
As a teen, Roy ran off to Delhi in search of freedom, and still considers it home. “I love it and hate it, because it’s become an unlivable city now,” she says, citing the heat and crime. She lives with two rescue dogs and often sees monkeys and crows on her balcony, and her friends and family are never far away. “I still have all my relationships from college. My sweethearts and ex-sweethearts, everybody is hanging around together somewhere.”
And she’s grateful for how her life—with all its ups and downs—has unfolded. “I’m able to say what I think and write what I want and to not be a cog in the machine,” she says. Through it all, she has remained her own complicated woman. Mary Roy would approve.
Elaine Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications. She’s the author of the novel I’m with Stupid.
