There are books you read. And then some books read you. Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me is the second kind.
I picked it up expecting literary brilliance — Roy won the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things in 1997, and she has never stopped commanding a room, a page, or a conscience since. What I did not expect was to find myself putting it down every few chapters to sit quietly with what had surfaced in me.
The woman who runs from the woman who made her.
Roy left home at 18. Not because she didn’t love her mother, Mary — a formidable single mother who built a school from nothing in Kerala, India, fought in court for women’s inheritance rights, and dispensed with what Roy calls “Mr Nothing” (her father) early on. She left, Roy writes, “not because I didn’t love her, but to be able to continue to love her.”
I have heard that sentence from clients. I have felt it myself. How many of us have had to create distance from someone we love to protect that love?
How many of us have built our entire professional identity — our ambition, our drive, our refusal to be trapped — in the shadow of a parent who was both our shelter and our storm? Roy describes her mother as precisely that: “my shelter and my storm.”
Four words. A whole lifetime.
The grief that surprises you.
Mary Roy died in September 2022. And Roy, activist, novelist, woman who has faced sedition charges and government censure, was undone by it. She writes that she was “heart-smashed.” Puzzled, even “more than a little ashamed” by how hard the loss hit her, given the complexity of what lay between them.
This is the part that stopped me in my tracks.
In my work with leaders, I see this pattern more than people realise. We think that because a relationship was complicated, the grief should be, too. Smaller. Conditional. We feel embarrassed by our own rawness. We have worked so hard to become independent, capable, self-sufficient. And then loss arrives and reminds us we were always someone’s child.
Grief does not audit the relationship before it shows up.
The mother is the original coach — for better and for worse.
Mary Roy was extraordinary. She challenged India’s inheritance laws. She built a school on sheer will. She was, by all accounts, impossible to land with — Roy describes her as “an airport with no runways.”
She was also, by her daughter’s own account, not easy to be raised by.
This is the tension Roy sits inside so honestly. Mary shaped Arundhati’s voice, her spine, her fury, her tenderness. And she also left wounds that took decades to examine.
I often reflect on this in relation to leadership development. Our earliest experiences of authority — of power, conditional love, or being seen or unseen — stay with us long after we’ve attained the corner office and the title. They appear in how we respond to feedback, in how we lead under pressure, and in whether we can ask for help without shame.
The mother is often the first leader we ever had. The first person who gave us a framework — however imperfect — for what strength looks like.
What it means to mourn your greatest subject.
Roy writes: “Even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject.”
I find this sentence extraordinary. It is, on the surface, a writer’s observation. But underneath it, it is something universal. We mourn the people who made us interesting to ourselves. The people who gave us our questions, our contradictions, our complexity. We mourn the relationship that was still unfinished, still becoming something.
And perhaps, and this is what I keep returning to, we mourn the version of ourselves that only existed in relation to them.
Three questions this book left me with.
Because this is what good writing does. It does not just tell you a story. It hands you a mirror.
So I offer these to you:
- Who in your life has been both your shelter and your storm — and have you ever named that honestly, even to yourself?
- What parts of your professional identity were built in response to someone else? And does that origin still serve you?
- If you lost the person who shaped you most, what would you be grieving beyond the loss of them?
These are not easy questions. But they are worth sitting with.
Mother Mary Comes to Me is not just a memoir about a mother and daughter in Kerala. It is about the inheritance we cannot see in any legal document. The one that lives in how we love, how we lead, and how long it takes us to understand where we came from.
Read it. Then sit quietly. And see what surfaces.
What relationships in your life have been the most formative — and the most complicated? I’d love to hear your reflections in the comments below.
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