Review: Basically, be glad you didn’t have Arundhati Roy’s mother

Arundhati Roy’s coruscating new memoir centers her tumultuous relationship with her mother Mary Roy, a brilliant but volatile pathbreaker the acclaimed novelist calls “my mother, my gangster...my shelter and my storm.”

In “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” the Booker Prize winner (for “The God of Small Things”) unpacks memories of her childhood and family in a series of nearly cinematic scenes, dense with the lyrical language, deep empathy and fierce social critique that have made Roy’s novels international bestsellers.

She begins with her own return to Kerala, India, in 2022 to attend her mother’s funeral. She’s overwhelmed by her emotions — “wrecked, heart-smashed” — although her brother, LKC, expresses surprise: “I don’t understand your reaction. She treated nobody as badly as she treated you