Reading Arundhati Roy Against My Will | Disha

For most of my life I have read political writing with a sense of duty rather than desire. I read to stay informed, not to feel changed. The books I encountered often seemed to assume a reader who could absorb weight without needing warmth, and I finished them more knowledgeable, but no more connected to the world they described.

When I picked up the memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me, I expected the same. I did not expect the book to reach the private interior of my reluctance or alter the way I understood political writing, but it did, slowly and then with a steady persistence.

The memoir itself acknowledges that many people separate the writer into two personalities, the one who writes fiction and the one who writes nonfiction, and I have always done the same separation but never for the usual reasons. My separation did not come from any belief that her fiction belongs to a different realm, because her novels are full of real people, real events and real histories. Instead, my separation came from the feeling that fiction, even when it is political, tends to soften reality through imagination, while the memoir lets political life flow directly into the private world without any protective layer. It was this open exposure to lived experience, rather than the political content itself, that changed my reading. At moments, this intimacy comes close to overwhelming the political frame itself, where feeling at times threatens to displace analysis altogether, but it is precisely this excess that gives the memoir its force.

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Mother Mary Comes To Me

by Arundhati Roy

Hamish Hamilton
2025
384 pages
ISBN-10 ? : ? 0241761719

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The memoir moves between her childhood, her mother