10/28/2026
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There’s one phrase in this memoir that explained my family to me.
Arundhati Roy calls her mother her shelter and her storm. Both. At once. The same woman, the same roof.
I’d spent years trying to decide which one my own mother was, as though the answer would let me close the file. Roy didn’t choose. She held both, and I realised that was the only honest way to tell it.
If you haven’t met Mary Roy yet, you should. She was a force of nature. She founded a school in Kottayam, took her own family to court, and won a landmark case that secured equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women. Plenty of women owe her a debt they may never know.
But the daughter who grew up under that same formidable will knew another side of her. Roy writes about her mother's brilliance, her cruelty, her force of personality, and what it meant to live in a house where one person's moods could determine the weather for everyone else.
But what undid me was the smallest thing. Roy called her mother “Mrs. Roy.” Not Mama. Not Mummy. Mrs. Roy. It’s such a quiet detail, and it says so much. It’s what you call someone you love and fear, someone you are partly made of but can’t quite reach. I know that kind of distance. I’ve lived in it. I’d just never seen anyone name it so exactly.
The title comes from the Beatles song “Let It Be,” in which a mother appears to a man in trouble and tells him to let things be. Roy’s mother never seemed able to do that. She couldn’t let anything be. And I thought of my own mother, so gifted and so relentless, and realised how many years I’d spent waiting to hear her say it.
Near the end, there’s a line I haven’t been able to shake. After her mother died, Roy writes, she mourned not only as a daughter but as a writer who had lost her most enthralling subject. I read that and finally exhaled.
Because that’s grief, isn’t it?
We don’t only lose the people who loved us well. We lose the people we spent years trying to understand, the ones who shaped us in ways we’re still untangling. And when they’re gone, we lose the possibility that one day we might finally understand them differently. Nobody quite prepares you for that kind of loss.
I know some readers have found the memoir merciless toward Mary Roy, or wondered how much of what is remembered can be trusted. Roy herself has spoken about how memory and imagination mingle in all of us, often beyond our ability to separate them. I think that is worth remembering when we read a memoir. This is one daughter's telling of her life with her mother, not a final judgment on a woman who can no longer tell her own side.
What matters to me is that Roy doesn't seem interested in making the story comfortable. She allows love and hurt to sit beside each other. She lets her mother be extraordinary without insisting she was always kind, and lets herself be a daughter without pretending that understanding came easily.
I loved The God of Small Things. I cherish this book just as much, though it has given me something different. That novel made me fall in love with Roy's writing. This memoir made me think about the courage it takes to write honestly about the people whose love has shaped us, especially when that love has left us carrying things we are still trying to understand.
I stood in that library for a long time. In the end, I didn’t close the file. I left it open, with the shelter and the storm side by side.
Both of them true. Both of them mine.
