by Arundhati Roy, 2025
I listened to the audio version of this book, Mother Mary Comes to Me, an astounding memoir by an Indian author and former Booker prize winner. The book is listed as one of the New York Times Best 10 Books for 2025 and Goodreads Best Memoir for 2025, among others. Normally I don’t care for audiobooks that are narrated by the author, but I’ll make an exception here. Once I got into the lyrical flow of her accented English, I couldn’t imagine this book narrated by anyone else.
The book is primarily about her fraught relationship with her difficult mother, at times completely unlovable and at other times her greatest champion. Because it’s a memoir about a strained relationship, I didn’t expect it to be so funny. In the opening chapter, she describes her melodramatic mother, who lived to be almost 89 and yet was preoccupied with her eminent death: “…she rewrote her will almost every other week. The number of false alarms, close shaves, and great escapes that she racked up would have given Houdini pause for thought.” As the author and her brother got older and dared to challenge her mother’s authority, the most common retort emanating from her would be, “Speaking as your banker…” Her mother was also her schoolteacher and so the siblings addressed her the way they did in school: Mrs. Roy, even at home.
In addition to the mother-daughter relationship, the author recounts her transition from her education and early career as an architect to her astounding rise as the Booker prize winner based on her debut novel The God of Small Things in 1997, something writers only dream of. She describes how the sudden fame and wealth coming from that book was as much of a challenge as the previous decades of living hand to mouth—she simply gave away money, deciding she would not care about it or care about any sort of accountability on the part of the recipients.
And this is what I love about memoirs in audio: during the narration, her emotions are so intense that at critical times in the story, her voice cracks. No professional narrator could ever emulate that kind of close connection to the material. Every time it happened, I had to turn off the recording and just hang in the moment. I felt like I was right there with her, experiencing her grief. Excellent choice to narrate your own book, ma’am.
