Coruscating ... May pack the same 'heart-smashing' wallop on readers. It is a masterpiece of memoir writing, a rich tapestry of memory, reckoning and longing.
[Roy's] strength has always been as a writer of the visceral, experiential, ephemeral, and small — the charge between two people, the light in a room, the texture of a child’s fear. In Mother Mary, she finally lets herself scale down. Nothing focuses the mind like the need to get your own story straight.
Roy’s spikiness is an abiding characteristic in the account she gives of the years that came between her studies and her emergence as a novelist ... There is nothing subdued or conciliatory in its account of the brutal transfer of power which comes when a parent is failing and a child assumes command.
Often feels like two books sutured together: a tender and ambivalent memoir about the difficult Mrs. Roy and a withering polemic about India’s political ills ... The problem is not that Roy has chosen to write about politics but that she has done so with all the subtlety of a pamphleteer. The incongruity of her two modes — the one searching and tentative, the other didactic and doctrinaire — becomes especially conspicuous when they appear side by side as they do here ... Still, this memoir is full of precise imagery and blistering emotional intelligence when it treats human relations.
This attempt to understand the compulsion to love what seems hostile transforms Roy’s writing, lending her prose, especially in the first 130 or so pages, an unprecedented freedom ... Utterly absorbing. They have a wonderful, self-assured self-sufficiency ... Throughout the book, but with especial force in the second half, Mrs Roy’s resistance and recalcitrance are an invigorating antidote to whatever our new world preaches is most rewarding about life.
Raw, unsparing ... Roy herself makes the case that her worldview stems from the feeling of dread—‘the cold moth on my heart’—that she knew as the wounded, ever-vigilant daughter of Mary Roy.
Sharp-edged and emotionally raw ... Roy captures the pain and grief underlying a relationship that can now only be celebrated in the aftermath of death ... At once stirring and triumphant in revealing two sharply different lives that prove more alike than these two would have ever believed – both fearless and unrepentant.
Roy’s stunning, dramatic, funny, far-ranging, and complexly illuminating chronicle portraying two strong-willed women fighting for justice and truth is incandescent in its fury, courage, and love.
Roy’s love-hate relationship with her dramatic, domineering, visionary mother is at the center of her incredible memoir ... Episodic and rich with detail and observation.
Neither too bleak nor overly conciliatory, the account does justice to often-irresolvable feelings of familial ambivalence. It’s a welcome addition to the shelf of memoirs about difficult moms.
