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A Rebel Writer's First Revolt

A memoir by Arundhati Roy chronicles her tumultuous relationship with her mother.

Inspired by her childhood spent in a Kerala village, the story about fraternal twins and their renegade single mother glides back and forth in time through atmosphere so rich you can feel the moisture lifting off the Meenachal River. Accepting the PEN Pinter Prize in London last year, she denounced the Israeli “apartheid apparatus,” refusing to blame Hamas for what she called “Israel’s unflinching and ongoing televised genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon.” It’s clear that Roy really cares. “On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room.” She started to see children whose parents doted on them as “the Mummydaddy people”: “I regarded them with a tangential interest that was laced with a faint protective drizzle of cultivated disdain.” After a terrible row in Roy’s late teens, she and Mary became estranged for years — before, inevitably, her mother pulled her back into the fold.

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