In those days, women were only allowed the option of cloying virtue—or its affectation…. I watched [my mother] unleash all of herself—her genius, her eccentricity, her radical kindness, her militant courage, her ruthlessness, her generosity, her cruelty, her bullying, her head for business, and her wild, unpredictable temper—with complete abandon….

Once I learned to protect myself (somewhat) from its soul-crushing meanness, I even grew fascinated by her wrath against motherhood itself. Sometimes the barefaced nakedness of it made me laugh….

She was my shelter and my storm.

And there you have Arundhati Roy’s new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me,all of it. Well, almost all of it—or maybe just some of it. It’s the kind of book that actually makes a reader think about how a book gets made, especially when all the necessary parts are there but somehow do not seem to get properly knit together.

Arundhati Roy was born in 1961 in the northeast Indian state of Meghalaya, then part of Assam, to a Christian mother and a Hindu father. Her mother was from Kerala, and her father was from West Bengal. When she was two years old, they divorced. A few years later, her mother, Mary, who had a degree in education, moved back to Kerala. Reluctantly she took her children—Arundhati and her older brother, LKC (Lalith Kumar Christopher)—along with her, a woman alone (then a much despised category in India) in a severely disapproving family. Mary had no desire to find another husband; what she wanted was an economic independence that would secure something like equality for her in a society that harshly discriminated against the female sex.

Determined that a career in education was the way forward, Mary almost single-handedly created an elementary school. She called it Corpus Christi, but it was later renamed Pallikoodam, meaning “school” in Malayalam. It opened in 1967 in the town of Kottayam and is still in operation. To this day, Roy writes, Pallikoodam has a reputation as one of the finest educational institutions in India.

But Mary was born to make war on the authorities, and in due time she did. In Kerala, which has a high proportion of Syrian Christians, Christian women could inherit either a fourth of their parents’ property or five thousand rupees, “whichever was less”; routinely, everything went to the male relatives. So Mary sued the state for an equal share of her father’s property and filed a petition demanding that it revoke this patently discriminatory law. Mary petitioned the government for decades, until at last the case went to the Supreme Court and she won.

The ruling was historic. It not only made Mary Roy famous throughout the country but gave her the status of a secular missionary. “When she heard of women in distress or read about terrible incidents in the papers,” her daughter writes, “she walked into hospitals and courtrooms and offered women her protection.”

Generations of students at Pallikoodam adored Mary; for them, she was a saint and a savior. Her own children, however, experienced her as a tyrant and an abuser. In The God of Small Things,the novel that won Arundhati the Booker Prize in 1997, the characters based on Arundhati and her brother are told by their mother, “If it wasn’t for you…I would be free! I should have dumped you in an orphanage the day you were born! You’re the millstones round my neck!” One way or another these words haunt Roy’s memoir; at times her mother seems deeply aggrieved by both her family and her country.

In the village of Ayemenem, where the Roys lived side by side with their many relatives, the coin of the realm was gossip and jealousy, envy and spite, self-righteousness and marital abuse. Like most of the families in the village, Mary’s too was marked by superstition and treachery, the aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents all making one another responsible for their own disappointed lives. Mary, who was the odd woman out, bore the brunt of it all, as in turn did her children. “My mother unloaded the burden of her quarrels and the daily dose of indignity that she had to endure onto my brother and me,” Arundhati confides. The result? LKC grew up as something of a child who failed to thrive. As Arundhati tells it, Mary “once said to him, ‘You’re ugly and stupid. If I were you, I’d kill myself.’ He was neither of those things. He was just quiet and unsure of himself.” Arundhati, however, was another matter altogether. Smart, willful, determined to live her life, she battled her mother every inch of the way, growing at last into one of the most psychologically complicated women one could ever hope to encounter.

In time Mary, amazed by the person Arundhati had become, did tell her that “if she put her mind to it, she could be anything she wanted to be.” To Arundhati, “those words were a life raft that tided her over pitch darkness, wild currents, and a deadly undertow.” When at sixteen she was accepted to the Delhi School of Planning and Architecture, she knew she was leaving home for good:

My childhood was over. I was no longer prepared to be humiliated…. I was no longer prepared to understand that when she hit me and raged at me, quite often it was because she was angry at someone else who she couldn’t hit or insult in the same way, so I stood in for them…. But that unspoken arrangement wasn’t acceptable to me anymore.

Seven years would pass before she saw her mother again. When at last they met it was as equal warriors.

Oh, yes, there is one other thing that Roy took away with her when she left home: a lifelong dread of domestic intimacy. She became

disconcerted by conventional, loving families, by their version of normality. They seemed to belong to a kind of alternative reality, sealed off from mine. I didn’t envy them, I didn’t long to be a part of them.

For her, the idea of home (that is, the place of comfort and safety where one’s nearest intimates reside) had in fact become threatening, which is more or less what she means when she says, “I learned early that the safest place can be the most dangerous. And that even when it isn’t, I make it so.” She knows how psychologically perverse this sounds, but she’s trying to explain herself as carefully as she can. Although she was married to a man she loved, she now lives alone. She has an apartment in Delhi whose walls she kisses regularly, as it is hers, hers alone, hers to live and die in exactly as she chooses. One would think this were a liberationist memoir from the 1970s or 1980s.

Her first boyfriend, with whom she ran off at eighteen, was Gerard da Cunha, a fellow architecture student and now a well-known Indian architect. But within a few years she left him, for no reason other than that she could not bear the relationship. She wandered around Delhi for a while, taking odd jobs just to stay alive, and in 1984 met and took up with Pradip Krishen, a married filmmaker twelve years her senior with whom she fell deeply in love. The couple discovered that their working sensibilities were a match when Roy began writing the screenplays for Krishen’s films. In time they did marry, although it seems they hardly ever lived a conventional life. Yet their working partnership achieved remarkable success with the movies In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989) and Electric Moon (1992) and innumerable teleplays made for Indian broadcasters.

When she was in her mid-thirties, the restlessness that often accompanied her flaring hatred of domesticity kicked in yet again, and she found herself newly dissatisfied with how she was spending her time. In 1992 she began writing The God of Small Things. Written in the grand tradition of Indian family novels, with a cast of dozens and intricate, even poetic plotting,the book was publishedfive years later, whereupon it achieved instant worldwide success. Seemingly overnight, Roy was rich, famous, and more culturally influential than Mother Mary had ever been.

Instead of writing another novel, which she did not do for some twenty years, Roy became something like a professional activist, speaking out—through books, projects, and demonstrations—against globalization, US foreign policy, the persecution of women, nuclear arms, and the Indian police. You name it, she was there. She also became a highly vocal partisan of Kashmiri independence.

Throughout Mother Mary Comes to Me, Roy offers the reader a number of memories that give her measure of her place in India. For instance when her brother graduated from college, he went to work in what she describes as the

misty, violent north of Kerala, where landlords were beheaded, where wild elephants roam free, where there is a whole dictionary of words for different kinds of rain, and people are said to measure the distance home by counting bolts of lightning.

The impression the reader is left with is that Kerala, a place riddled through with generations of family influence, remains as suffocating for Roy today as it was in her childhood.

Another time, in her early thirties, married and an urban professional, Roy is taking a long night drive with her husband, and of this drive she writes:

We passed a buffalo cart with a lantern tied behind it for a taillight. The driver of the cart was lying on his back, singing to the stars, confident that his buffalo would take him home. I remember feeling jealous of him. I remember thinking that no matter how long and hard we fought, in India no woman of any religion, class, caste, or creed would ever feel safe enough to sing to the stars on a lonely highway while her buffalo took her home.

Roy does not seem to believe that things have changed significantly for women in India since her mother raged against its sexist strictures.

It was around this point in the book that, vivid as these incidents are, it suddenly struck me that Mother Mary Comes to Me had long since begun to read like an autobiography rather than a memoir, as Mary herself seemed to have been left far behind. I began to wonder about the author’s intent. I understand the situation, I thought, but what is the story? Which led me back to the question of how a book—or perhaps I should say this book—might have been put together.

An autobiography, more often than not, is meant to be the record of an exemplary life; written by an artist, a missionary, or a politician, it usually intends to set the record straight by affirming or correcting or elucidating the author’s place in the history or enterprise with which he or she is associated. The effort is intellectual; analysis and interpretation are its strong points.

A memoir, on the other hand, sets out to shape a single piece of experience; it has as its motivating force an emotional insight that holds all the parts together and determines the shape of the narrative. In this sense the memoir is rather like a novel in that it depends on dramatized storytelling for its success. The important word here is dramatized. It is dramatization, the story, that makes the memoir live, and not only live but grow large. Again, very much like novels, great memoirs—Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, J.R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself—will enter the reader’s inner life if the dramatization achieves something more significant than the accumulation of its incidents and becomes, in fact, metaphorical.

Not so very long ago books that read like memoirs were often published as novels because the memoir had no publishing cachet. Many readers, myself included, find themselves reading these novels anew. Three in particular that I now read as memoirs are Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth,Lore Segal’s Other People’s Houses, and Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. Smedley’s book, published in 1929, is a harrowing tale of a woman’s emergence from nineteenth-century ignorance and poverty; Segal’s book, published in 1964, is an account of the life of a ten-year-old refugee in England during World War II; and The Lover, published in 1984, is about a woman coming of age sexually in 1930s French Indochina. All three are masterful books dominated by a first-person narrator whose prodigious gift for storytelling animates the entire work. I now call these books memoirs because there is no doubt in my mind that the narrators are the writers themselves, using their own unmediated personae to tell the story that needs to be told; that need, in all of these books, is palpable.

In essence what I am talking about is the ability to put felt life on the page, a talent intimately related to focused storytelling, the very thing I’m sorry to say I find lacking more often than not in Mother Mary Comes to Me. Arundhati Roy is a deeply gifted writer, page by page she’s a pleasure to read, and in this book the piece of experience that arrests her attention—mother love gone missing—is made clear. But somehow she becomes so involved in rehearsing the main events of her own professional development that she loses sight of her mother—as a character—for long stretches of writing time, thus forgoing the chance to make imaginative use not only of Mary herself but of her situation as well. So many tantalizing sentences go by without being made vivid:

What exasperated her most about Micky [Arundhati’s father], my mother said, was that he had no respect for the truth.

My mother had won her case…[and] become a national feminist icon.

For her girl students, Mrs. Roy was the hope for escape.

Even when Mary herself is present, she does not come alive on the page, because the incidents that might demonstrate her monstrously unfeeling behavior are summarized rather than dramatized. It would have been exciting, for instance, on more than one occasion, to be inside Mary—that is, to experience an event or a situation directly as she did, not as we’ve been told she did; after all, she is a character whose internal violence is crucial to whatever tale this memoir is expecting the reader to absorb. We want to feel her raging against the family, cursing out the children, facing down a government official. As it is, her elaborate eccentricities come to us secondhand, with their power much diminished. It’s a pity, as the necessary elements for a good memoir are all here; all that was needed was clarity of intent to transform an autobiography into a memoir.

Oddly enough, clarity of intent often deserts a novelist or a poet when it comes to writing a memoir. But clarity of intent defines, even determines, the genre at which a writer can excel. Very often, however excellent a novelist or a poet may be at writing novels or poems, the gift for memoir remains elusive.