In Conversation With Arundhati Roy On The Politics Of Dissent And Her Memoir, 'Mother Mary Comes To Me'

A conversation with Arundhati Roy expands, like a river finding its many bends: slow at first, then rushing to meet unexpected turns. Over Zoom, her voice on the other end of the screen carries a cadence that’s part storyteller, part teacher, part rebel, refusing to dilute her truth. It’s the kind of voice that fills the room, even across pixels; intimate, wry, and edged with a clarity so sharp it leaves you rearranging your own questions before you’ve even asked them. Sitting before the icon, I find myself anxious, not because she’s unkind or unwelcoming, but because her presence demands precision. What do you ask someone whose words have, for decades, shaped the political and literary imagination of a nation? What do you ask someone whose first book altered the way the world read Indian fiction?

The Personal is Political

Roy’s sentences often cut through the noise like surgical instruments. Her essays have a way of unsettling the reader out of complacency, and her novels hum with myth and memory in equal measure. Few writers command the reverence she does. The God of Small Things (1997), her Booker Prize-winning debut, announced her as a voice unlike any other: lyrical, searing, unafraid. Her political essays have cemented her reputation as a lightning rod of controversy and admiration alike. And now, she steps into a space more treacherous than polemics or fiction: memory. Mother Mary Comes to Me, published by Penguin Random House India, is not just about her mother, Mary Roy. It is also, inevitably, about Arundhati Roy, herself, and the tangled thread that ran between them, characterised by knots of love and defiance, distance and proximity, grievance and gratitude.

In the memoir, she speaks of a childhood marked by turbulence, of navigating architecture school, of drifting through odd jobs and film work before finding her voice on the page. She writes of the men who crossed her life, of fury and tenderness, of how everything shifted in the early years. We see ourselves reflected in this book in surprising ways, even when our lives have nothing in common with hers. This is Roy’s particular gift — she forces you to sit with yourself. Again and again, she circles back to a single line: “I learned early that the safest place can be the most dangerous. And that even when it isn’t, make it so.”It takes courage to return to one’s own past, to peel back its layers and examine not only the wounds but also the reasons behind them. Love arrives without logic, hearts fracture and heal and fracture again; the cycle never ends. Roy writes about this truth with a rawness that’s painful and consoling at the same time. 

Defying Labels

Roy tells me the book’s title, borrowed from the Beatles' ‘Let It Be’, is less a confession and more an invocation. “It was really the death of my mother and my own puzzlement at the intensity of my reaction that made me start writing it,” she says. “It’s not that I ever thought I’d write a memoir, but in my head, I always try and work my life out by writing.”

Grief often resists language, yet Roy treats it less as mourning or survival and more as a literary challenge. Mary Roy, after all, was not a figure who could be reduced to a tidy anecdote. “She was such a complicated and extraordinary woman,” Roy said, with a faint flicker of amusement. “How do you do justice to a character like her?”

This refusal to flatten to fit a narrative is at the heart of the book. Roy writes of her mother as someone she once fled from at eighteen, and now returns to in prose both fierce and tender. Love and pain, defiance and devotion, are woven into every page—sometimes in collision, sometimes in embrace. When asked how she navigates such contradictions, she replies with an irreverent candour: “Because I’m a good writer.” 

In some sense, the memoir is not a departure but a revelation of the scaffolding behind her novels — the source code of her imagination. “The village where The God of Small Things was set is part of Mother Mary Comes to Me,” she explains. “Many of the characters, the texture of that life, served me as a writer.” And yet, the book resists nostalgia. It is, instead, alive with the contradictions of memory: jagged, tender, unwilling to be tamed. 

Protest and rebellion have long been associated with Roy, an inheritance as much as an instinct. Her mother, an activist in her own right, raised her in the shadow of marches, meetings, and movements, where dissent was not performance but survival. Roy carries that lineage forward and is clear about what it’s not. “Going to a protest at India Gate isn’t revolution,” she says sharply. “Social media isn’t rebellion. It can give shut-down voices a platform, but it also makes us more controlled by the state, by the market. It’s like a new organ in our bodies, except unlike our real organs, it may not have our best interests at heart.”

Get Up, Stand Up

Her ability to hold contradictions like liberation and surveillance, love and anger, grief and clarity in the same breath feels central not just to her writing but to her worldview. In her twenties, Roy had already learned to resist the culture of relentless striving. “One hundred per cent, hustle culture kills creativity,” she says firmly. “I never had a job because I found it hard to have a boss. From the time I was 16, I was manoeuvring not to. But everybody can’t do that. Still, the idea that you must grind yourself into the ground—I don’t believe in that at all.”

Listening to her, I think of the generations that have grown up in acceleration, life lived at speed, measured in deadlines and scrolls. Roy, by contrast, insists on stillness. “What people think of as freedom today is often just consumption,” she observes. “Before they’re grown up, they’re already turned into consumers: of information, of books, of everything. And they feel they’re free, but they’re only allowed to be free in certain ways. I wish the young generation had another kind of 60s revolution, where everybody just says, ‘Thanks, but no thanks, we don’t want this.’”

It is in these moments, when she pivots from personal reflection to political clarity, that you glimpse the full arc of Roy’s mind, the way her sentences stretch from the intimate to the global without pause. And yet, when the conversation circles back to her mother, she resists drawing conclusions. What words would Mary Roy have chosen to describe this memoir, I ask? Roy doesn’t speculate. “I never knew what my mother would think from one hour to the next,” she says. “I can’t put words in her mouth. This is my book. Whatever she says is fine.”

Lastly, I ask her what advice she would give young women writing today. She laughs softly, as though the very premise amuses her. “I’m very bad at giving advice. My advice is don’t ask for advice. The best thing is to try and know yourself, listen to yourself, and stop listening to the noise around you.”

Read the full story on ELLE India’s new issue, or download your digital copy via Magzter.