Last year (2025) saw two remarkable memoirs published by the renowned authors, Arundhati Roy and Margaret Atwood. Both books relate the author’s development as a writer and situate them within their family, their country of origin and their times. Each is quite a different reading experience.
Mother Mary Comes to Me is a memoir by Arundhati Roy, the author of Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things. This book took my breath away.
An extraordinary aspect of this book is Arundhati Roy’s life itself. Her fundamental challenge has been to survive her cruel and unpredictable mother, Mary Roy, whom she refers to in the book as Mrs Roy.
The memoir is more than a reflection on the author’s relationship with her mother. After leaving home at the age of eighteen with nothing to sustain her, Arundhati lived amongst the poorest of the poor, studied architecture, worked in film, engaged in relationships, married, taught herself to write and launched into international fame with the publication of her first novel, The God of Small Things. She emerges as a survivor, someone who uses her intelligence and wit to make her way in the world and then returns to care for her mother in her final days.
Another extraordinary feature of Mother Mary Comes to Me is its distinctive voice. Despite the horrors of Arundhati’s childhood and some of the events in Indian politics she describes, this memoir maintains a generally upbeat tone with a turn of phrase that is often humorous.
Arundhati Roy is a great observer of people and places. The layers of description in the book are a source of wonder and enjoyment although some readers have said they could do with a good edit.
This is a memoir which reveals much about the author and her engagement in multiple aspects of Indian life, including its politics. I learned a lot from reading it.
Margaret Atwood has subtitled her Book of Lives as A Memoir of Sorts. It follows the progress of her Canadian life from girlhood to the age of 86. In contrast to Arundhati Roy, Atwood enjoyed an emotionally secure upbringing albeit in an unusual family.
Margaret’s father was an expert on insects and a lover of nature. He took his family to live in the woods with no modern conveniences for large parts of the year. Margaret and her brother were encouraged to explore and make their own entertainment. Margaret created stories, plays and cartoons to amuse her family. She was a quirky child who knew from an early age that she wanted to become a writer.
As an adult, Margaret Atwood has published prolifically as a poet, a novelist, a short story writer, a graphic novelist and a writer of children’s books. She is probably best known for her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, made famous through a television series.
As Atwood chronicles her life and writing in this memoir, her sardonic, often self-depreciating wit lights up the prose. The book has many laugh-out-loud moments. While the progress of her writing career provides a backbone for the memoir, Atwood fleshes out her life around it with fascinating accounts of where she has lived, her friends and lovers, her husbands, her travels, her fellow writers and a lot of information about Canada. Like Arundhati Roy, Atwood became a political activist and public intellectual, in Margaret’s case with a focus on the environment.
Although Book of Lives is lengthy, its interest never wanes. The inclusion of Atwood’s cartoons and photos of her family and friends add to the enjoyment of this fascinating account of a writer’s life.