MEMOIR—PERHAPS MORE THAN any other form of nonfiction—rests on our ability to see that the writer understands something about herself and her material. When that understanding clicks into focus in Mother Mary Comes to Me, the effect is tremendous.
In the West, memoirs tend to emphasize private drama, with politics serving as backdrop or belated reflection. But Roy’s memoir enacts a different philosophy of life writing: not the story of a self finding voice against a backdrop of politics, but the story of a self saturated with politics at every turn. It is, in this sense, a corrective to the Western tendency to conceive of memoir as a private drama of self-discovery, a story that emphasizes the individual above all. For Roy, selfhood itself is political terrain. This project helps explain both the strengths and the frustrations of Mother Mary Comes to Me. Roy the person is building a record of what it feels like to live within the turbulence of politics, family, patriarchy, and history. But Roy the novelist, with her ability to etch character in indelible strokes, seems at times absent here.
Yet the book’s messiness is also what makes it fascinating. Like the mother at its center, it is unforgettable and exhausting. Perhaps that is its truest accomplishment—and also its limit: to be as fiercely contradictory as the figure it portrays and as the genre it inhabits. {read}