The subtext of straight talk continues in her latest work centred around the fraught relationship with her mother Mary Roy, a celebrated educator and women’s rights activist who fought the landmark case allowing Kerala’s Syrian Christian women equal rights in their father’s property.
Roy said the book was born out of the “onrush of memories and feelings provoked by Mary’s death” in 2022 at the age of 89.
“I wrote this book because I feel that my mother is someone who deserves to be shared with the world.”
“Mother Mary Comes to Me” offers a deep dive into her tumultuous life, with Roy mincing no words as she gives voice to long-held emotions and recounts her equation with her tough, strong-headed mother.
She describes the book as neither a judgment nor an accusation, and certainly not a “hagiography”.
For a writer, she adds, the most interesting thing is to “write without resolving”.
“I never responded to her..I was quiet all this time, but here’s here it is, you know…I try not to judge her. I don’t know whether that’s right or wrong, but I tried and I succeeded, I think,” the 63-year-old explained.
“I just think as a writer, she is an unusual character in her own way. It was difficult. But what’s the point to write something that’s not difficult is no point. There’s no point in writing anything that’s not difficult to write.”
Revered by her fans and almost unfailing reviled by her critics, the 2024 Pen Pinter Prize awardee’s work has often provoked extreme reactions — from burning her effigies and disrupting her events to being told to go to Pakistan and facing charges of sedition and contempt, this celeb author-activist has seen it all.