What to Make of the Mother Who Made You

It is hard to overstate the literary impact, in 1997, of Arundhati Roy’s début novel, “The God of Small Things.” A family drama set in a small town in Kerala, in southern India, it was evocatively specific in its narrative, centered on twins whose mother—an erratic, imperious woman of exceptional gifts and unsalvable injuries—had been scandalously married, and more scandalously divorced. At the same time, the book achieved universality in its themes: the entanglements of kinship, the restrictions imposed by class and gender, the hazards of star-crossed love. Lyrical, comic, and intricately wrought, the novel won the Booker Prize, earned Roy a fortune in advances and foreign rights, and went on to sell millions of copies in dozens of languages.

If readers assumed that another novel would swiftly follow, Roy, then thirty-five, flouted their expectation; she didn’t publish a second novel—“The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”—until 2017. In the meantime, she devoted her energies and her international renown to political writing in India, taking on the expansion of the country’s nuclear arsenal, the despoliation of rivers and forests in the name of development, the brutalities inflicted on women, and the suppression of cultural pluralism in the name of Hindu supremacy. (She also established a trust, funded in part by a portion of her royalties, that supports activists, journalists, and teachers.) “My Seditious Heart,” a collection of her nonfiction work which was published in 2019, runs to more than a thousand pages and offers scarcely a glimpse of autobiography. A rare disclosure comes in a book-length essay called “Walking with the Comrades,” her report on time spent among Maoist rebels in the forests of central India. “The day before I left, my mother called, sounding sleepy,” Roy recalls. “ ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, with a mother’s weird instinct, ‘what this country needs is a revolution.’ ”

With her new book, “Mother Mary Comes to Me” (Scribner), Roy turns to her mother, Mary Roy, whom she calls her “most enthralling subject” and her “gangster.” In addition to rearing Arundhati and her older brother alone, in defiance of both family and society, Mary founded an enduring educational establishment and was so persistent an activist that a landmark legal ruling bears her name. For years, Arundhati was estranged from her mother, yet she was never free of her. She struggled against her mother’s dictates even as she remained entwined with her, not unlike an unborn child straining against the walls of the womb, fists and feet pressing for freedom from the very body on which she depends.

Some daughters manage to avoid developing a complicated agon with their mothers, but those lucky daughters, it would seem, seldom become novelists. For the rest, the struggle is formative. It may involve the daughter’s feeling not only that her mother can read her mind but that she has written it. Roy recalls her mother’s hypercritical gaze as an act both of creation and of demolition: “It felt as though she had cut me out—cut my shape out—of a picture book with a sharp pair of scissors and then torn me up.” She learned early the futility of trying to please or appease. What she absorbed instead was the power of unyielding dissent. From the moment Roy could walk, she was marching in step with a formidable rebel.

Readers of “The God of Small Things” will recognize the outlines. Like Rahel and Estha, the novel’s twins, Roy was the child of a mixed marriage: a father from a Hindu family and a mother from a Syrian Christian minority that prized its aloofness. Ammu, the twins’ mother, marries young to escape a violent home life, then returns when her husband’s drinking makes the marriage untenable. Mary Roy, too, married to flee violence—her father, a civil servant under the British, beat his wife and whipped his children—only to find that her husband was an incorrigible drunk. Before her children were five, she had left him, taking them to a holiday cottage littered with her father’s discarded formal clothing and shared with an eccentric English tenant who “wore her hair in a high, puffy style, which made us wonder what was hidden inside it. Wasps, we thought.” Eventually, Mary retreated to her family’s ancestral house in Kerala, presided over by an almost blind grandmother, a censorious great-aunt, and a Rhodes Scholar uncle who held forth at dinner about Dionysus. All would be transmuted, lightly, into fiction.

In “The God of Small Things,” it is Ammu’s illicit love for a low-caste younger man that sets in motion the tragic event at the novel’s center. That romance was invented. As Roy notes, the one boundary that her mother never crossed, so far as she knew, was “sexual probity.” Mary’s fervor lay elsewhere. She was intellectual, combative, and indignant at the structural disadvantages that she faced. Her name endures in Indian law: Mary Roy Etc. v. State of Kerala and Others, a 1986 Supreme Court decision that struck down her community’s practice of granting sons a larger share of inheritance. Trained as a teacher before marriage, she co-founded a school in the small town of Kottayam when Arundhati was seven, presiding over it with charismatic, autocratic force. She even required her children to address her the way the other students did, as Mrs. Roy—a title that Roy uses for the better part of the book.

Mrs. Roy’s pedagogy was strikingly unconventional. When she discovered boys teasing girls about their changing bodies, she convened an assembly, dispatched two culprits to fetch her Maidenform undergarment, and then held it up before the school: “This is a bra. All women wear them. Your mother wears them. Your sisters will too, soon enough. If it excites you so much, you are very welcome to keep mine.” But Mrs. Roy’s fearlessness as a shaper of the minds and morals of children curdled into cruelty when it came to her own offspring. Her son’s middling grades infuriated her. “You’re ugly and stupid. If I were you, I’d kill myself,” she told him when he was a teen-ager. Arundhati fared better in school, but any praise that she received was shadowed by her brother’s humiliation. “Since then, for me, all personal achievement comes with a sense of foreboding,” she writes. “On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room. If you pause to think about it, it’s true, someone is.”

At sixteen, Roy left for Delhi to study architecture, inspired by Laurie Baker, the British-born proponent of tropical modernism, whom her mother had recruited to design school buildings. In Delhi, Roy was, as she puts it, “the opposite of what Syrian Christian girls were meant to be—I was thin and dark and risky.” Within two years, she had broken with her mother. Before a visit home, she confessed that she had a boyfriend; her mother’s fury was volcanic. “Insults washed over me like a tide,” Roy recalls. “Apart from the usual ones, the additional theme of course was ‘whore’ and ‘prostitute.’ ” (She got off lightly, she mordantly notes, compared with the family dog, which her mother had shot after it mated with a stray—“a kind of honor killing.”) The rupture was decisive. Back in Delhi, Roy lived first in a squat, then in a hut next to a fourteenth-century fortress wall, with “open drains into which children practiced aiming their shit.” By graduation, at twenty-one, she writes, she had “become a strange person, of a somewhat vagrant disposition . . . a small person with spikes.”

Roy’s spikiness is an abiding characteristic in the account she gives of the years that came between her studies and her emergence as a novelist. Just as she maintained her distance from her mother, she pushed away lovers and kept other intimates at bay. Even when she met the man she eventually married—the filmmaker Pradip Krishen, with whom she worked as an actress and a collaborator—she remained vigilantly isolate. She began to write, searching for her own language: “I needed to hunt it down like prey. Disembowel it, eat it. . . . It was out there somewhere, a live language-animal, a striped and spotted thing, grazing, waiting for me the predator.” When she was in her mid-twenties, she and her mother managed a fragile rapprochement, but the severance remained, and this gave her time and space to write “The God of Small Things.” The novel, published to immediate controversy in India—an obscenity suit was filed over its portrayal of an intercaste romance—offended her Syrian Christian kin, who grumbled about misrepresentation. Mrs. Roy hosted the book’s launch at her school, then, characteristically, talked all the way through her daughter’s reading. “She presented me and, in the same breath, undermined me,” Roy recalls.

“Mother Mary Comes to Me” was written in the wake of Mary Roy’s death, in 2022, after years of illness. There is nothing subdued or conciliatory in its account of the brutal transfer of power which comes when a parent is failing and a child assumes command. During a hospital stay, Roy’s enfeebled mother fixates on the caste and religious affiliations of the doctors treating her—the sort of thing that will be familiar to anyone who has cringed at a diminished elder’s unfiltered prejudices. Roy, whose own life of activism on behalf of India’s marginalized mirrors her mother’s crusade for education and women’s rights, is seized by a rage comparable to that of her mother at her most extreme, and smashes a chair down in the hospital room. “Her body jerked. I could literally see the sound traveling through it,” Roy writes. “I thought I had killed her. But I hadn’t. I had only killed something in myself.”

The moment crystallizes a theme that runs through all of Roy’s work: how politics and social order shape, and often warp, our capacities for love and empathy. She describes “those knotted feelings, all that twisted, matted anger, the fetid threads of caste and feudal hierarchy that slither into our souls even in our most intimate moments of insanity, vulnerability, and mortality. . . . Do we have to kill our own mothers to exorcise this horror that lives inside us?”

Other daughters, other mothers. The novelist and commentator Molly Jong-Fast doesn’t quite confess to matricidal fantasies in her memoir, “How to Lose Your Mother,” but she is self-aware about how a domineering mother might drive even the most loving of daughters to violence, if only on the page. Born in 1978, Jong-Fast is the daughter of Erica Jong, who, five years earlier, became an international avatar of second-wave feminism with “Fear of Flying,” the novel that immortalized the “zipless fuck.” “Now think about being the offspring of the person who wrote that,” Jong-Fast quips. “And pour one out for me.”

Like Roy, she depicts life inside a confounding dyad: her mother, a world-class narcissist, proclaimed her daughter’s specialness while betraying disappointment at everything about her. Erica Jong plundered her daughter’s childhood for material—in a children’s book about divorce, she had a four-year-old, Molly-shaped character complain, “I think divorce is dumb because I never remember where I left my underpants”—yet sent the actual child away to live for long stretches with a nanny. Later, Jong would describe this as “benign neglect.” Her daughter eventually corrected her: “It was just neglect neglect. Benign makes it sound intentional. Stop saying that.”

Jong-Fast’s book is a valediction, like “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” but a necessarily compromised one: it was written not cleanly after Jong’s death but messily during her descent into alcoholism and dementia. There are bottles of wine consumed in a day, and shit in the bed. Jong-Fast shoulders the duties of caring for her mother and her ailing stepfather—or of guiltily hiring others to do so—while also tending to her husband, who has been diagnosed with cancer. It’s a lot. Her portrait of her mother is unflinching and often grotesque. “When I arrived at her apartment, she was wearing a half-open hot-pink bathrobe,” she recalls. “I wish I could report this was a new thing, but every man I’ve ever dated has seen my mother naked. She’s always wearing a half-open bathrobe.”

After a lifetime of playing the mini-adult to her elders—Jong-Fast got sober as a teen-ager; her mother and stepfather then found her “hopelessly square”—she manages a modicum of forgiveness toward Erica. “I wish I’d asked her why, if she loved me so much, she didn’t ever want to spend time with me,” she writes. Then comes the reckoning, discomforting to any writer who has ever closed a study door on a child’s high-pitched imprecations: “In her view, she did spend time with me—in her head, in her writing, in the world she inhabited. I was there. I may have felt she was slightly allergic to me, but to her, she was spending time with the most important version of me.”

What if your mother isn’t a monster? Even then, she may loom monumental—“hard to capture fully,” as Jill Bialosky writes of her mother, Iris, in “The End Is the Beginning.” “I suppose all mothers are,” Bialosky continues. “Larger than life, they leave their shadows and absences.” Bialosky calls her mother “never ordinary,” and indeed Iris’s life bore more than its share of tragedy. She lost her own mother at nine, was widowed in her twenties with three small daughters, and later endured the suicide of her youngest child at twenty-one—the subject of Bialosky’s earlier memoir, “History of a Suicide.” What gives the new book its resonance, though, is not the extremity of catastrophe but the ordinariness of Iris’s passage through the tempo of her times—the stirrings of feminism, the whole-foods dawning of the hippie era—which Bialosky chronicles in flashes with an Annie Ernaux-like lens, locating the individual in the general. She wonders whether her mother envied her daughters their generational freedoms, but concludes bleakly, “I am not sure she felt she was capable of ambition.”

Bialosky seeks to excavate her mother’s past through a reverse chronology: she starts at the end, with a nod to T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” and tracks Iris’s life back to its origins. The book opens with a FaceTime funeral, in March, 2020. Then come the years of decline in a nursing home, where Iris cannot dress or use the toilet unassisted. “We noticed the aide neglected to put on her bra, and her bosom had fallen to her belly,” Bialosky observes of one encounter. (The late-life indignities of the once nurturing maternal body recur across the genre. Arundhati Roy recalls the round-the-clock helpers who cared for Mary Roy in her final years. “The amber cake of translucent Pears soap looked as big as a brick in her hands,” she writes of one. “For her to lift and hold up my mother’s breasts was something of an endeavor, and all the women, including my mother, would laugh about it.”) It’s honorable to insist that others acknowledge a loved one’s distinct identity even when age and disease have reduced that loved one to her most basic, primal aspects. But outsiders may never share a daughter’s recognition.“There is a screamer in one room on Iris’s new floor, and a wailer in another,” Bialosky writes—diminishing the humanity of other people’s parents even as she strives to preserve her own mother’s.

Not every elegy comes in the form of a dying fall. “This Is Your Mother,” by the first-time author Erika J. Simpson, moves with a quick, incessant urgency, much like the vibrating phone that opens an early chapter, on an August evening in 2013. On the line is Simpson’s maternal aunt, calling to say that her mother’s cancer has returned—it’s her fifth bout—and that this time it’s everywhere: Sallie Carol has two months to live. Shuttling between past and present, Simpson traces her mother’s hardscrabble journey as the daughter of North Carolina sharecroppers who excels in school and becomes a teacher, then a mother, then a single mother of two. Erika, her younger daughter, is an accidental pregnancy, born despite Sallie Carol’s brain tumor—her first cancer. Erika’s childhood is steeped in instability: Sallie Carol evades rent payments, cons taxi-drivers, and teaches her daughters the art of “reverse Robin Hooding, in which you challenge the poor to give to the poor if they’re working for the rich.” After driving a car off a lot without paying for it, Sallie Carol spends a year in jail, where she is diagnosed with breast cancer. Later, she shows a prepubescent Erika the results of her surgery: “Her right breast came out like normal, answering gravity, full and brown. The other was stiff. Something new. Sculpted. It still looked like brown flesh, but artificially formed.”