Travel Bug Book Group

Mother Mary Comes to Me
By Arundhati Roy
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Named One of The New York Times Book Review’s Top Ten Books of the Year

“As a child I loved her irrationally, helplessly, fearfully, completely, as children do. As an adult I tried to love her coolly, rationally, and from a safe distance. I often failed.”
— Arundhati Roy

A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Mother Mary Comes to Me, is an intimate chronicle, “full of precise imagery and blistering emotional intelligence” (The Washington Post), of the relationship between two women, a school teacher and a writer, who happen to be mother and daughter. Roy writes with a novelist’s unsettling ability to be inside her own story as well as outside it, simultaneously child and adult, attached and detached, protagonist and narrator. She describes how she came to be the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”

“Heart-smashed” by Mary’s death, yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.”

With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me “builds worlds that are revolutionary, made from the darkness that she spins into purpose” (The New Republic). An ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—Mother Mary Comes to Me is a memoir like no other.

Purchase Online from Travel Bug
Audio

Discussion group is hosted in Travel Bug the first Tuesday of the month by Aimee Gwynne Franklyn, an independent curator, art historian and producer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Everyone welcome! A glass of beer or wine on us!