Podcast Summary: Your Next Listen — Author Arundhati Roy on Talk Easy

Host: Stan Fragoso
Guest: Arundhati Roy
Date: October 27, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode features acclaimed author and activist Arundhati Roy in a deeply personal and political conversation, centered around her new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. Roy and host Stan Fragoso discuss the complexities of her relationship with her late mother, Mary Roy—a pioneering feminist and educator—and explore how personal history intertwines with public struggles. The conversation also delves into Roy’s literary career, her political activism, and her reflections on resistance in the face of rising authoritarianism in both India and the United States.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Writing the Memoir: Structure, Motivation, and Grief

• Memoir’s Motivation & Structure
  • Roy describes Mother Mary Comes to Me as her most linear book, but one that still journeys creatively through memory and history ([05:18]).
  • The genesis was a vivid image of her elderly mother, “like this feudal queen,” being bathed—a symbol of drama, power, spectacle, and their complicated intimacy ([05:52]).
• Processing Grief
  • Roy felt compelled to write the memoir following her mother’s death in 2022, shocked by the “intensity of my grief” despite a lifelong effort to maintain distance for self-preservation.

    “I was shocked at my own grief because I had spent so much of my life trying to create a sort of safe distance from her in order to be able to love her without allowing her to destroy me.” —Arundhati Roy ([06:41])

2. Mary Roy: A Complex Parental Legacy

• A Formidable Matriarch and Feminist
  • Mary Roy is depicted as charismatic and fierce, yet unpredictable and difficult—a woman who challenged India’s discriminatory inheritance laws, started her own school, and deeply influenced feminist education ([03:10], [10:09]).
• Trauma and Impact on Roy and Her Brother
  • Family life, marked by Mary’s humiliation and rage, often translated to unpredictably harsh parenting, particularly toward Roy’s brother ([11:02]).
  • Roy reflects on childhood moments of witnessing her brother’s abuse:

    “That made me hate myself. Because I just felt that when you're applauded, someone quiet is being beaten in the other room. And that became a very political thing for me.” —Arundhati Roy ([14:36])

3. The Politics of Childhood and Family Memory

• Literary Motifs of Unwanted and Unprotected Children
  • Roy sees parallels in her fiction and memoir—children immersed in chaos and resistance, symbolic of broader social and political marginalization ([17:05]).
  • She reads a seminal passage from The God of Small Things about being pushed between parents, blurring fiction and memory ([18:59]).

4. Cost of Revolution and the Public/Private Split

• The Price Paid by the Family
  • Roy and her brother bore the hidden costs of their mother’s public activism, living with extra scrutiny and sometimes punitive treatment at her school ([20:12]).
  • The discussion addresses the dangers of equating public heroism with personal virtue ([21:27]).
  • On holding complexity:

    “Both things are true… I learned from the darkness as well as from the light.” —Arundhati Roy ([22:46])

5. Feminism, Legacy, and Ambivalence

• Reconciling Public Feminism and Private Pain
  • Roy reflects on the contradiction between her mother’s revolutionary work and her personal failures as a parent ([21:34]).

    “That doesn’t give you the right to call a four-year-old boy who’s your son a male chauvinist pig and hold him responsible for what men have done in the world.” —Arundhati Roy ([22:18])

6. Artistry: The Role of Architecture, Cinema, and Audio in Roy’s Writing

• Evolution as a Writer
  • Roy discusses how her background in architecture and film shapes her writing—she “hears” her books as audio before writing them ([32:13], [36:03]).

    “For me, writing is an audio track. It's like remembering a song from a long time ago. I hear what I write.” —Arundhati Roy ([36:03])

7. From Literary Darling to Political Dissident

• Political Awakening and Consequences
  • Roy describes the shift after The God of Small Things, when she became a public critic of nuclear nationalism and state violence in India ([37:22]).
  • Consequences included prosecution under anti-terror laws, constant court cases, and public vilification ([37:50]).

    “National critic of India is a polite way of putting it. Normally: anti national, traitor, sedition, terrorist and all that stuff.” —Arundhati Roy ([37:07])

• Speaking Truth Despite Threats
  • Roy writes from a place where danger is real, describing each essay as potentially her last ([41:49], [41:56]).

8. Global Rise of Authoritarianism and Lessons from India

• Striking Parallels Between India and the US

  • Roy observes the alarming similarity in right-wing ascendance and strategies in both countries ([44:09]):

    “…the similarities are so unnerving that you want to know, is there an actual physical playbook? I mean, does it have pages that you can turn?” —Arundhati Roy ([44:09])

  • She warns that the normalization of violence and majoritarianism can erode democratic values, with media functioning as enablers ([45:27], [45:53]).

• Solidarity and the Need for Imperfect Allies

  • Roy emphasizes the urgent need for solidarity on the left, warning against the pursuit of perfect political alignments:

    “If we don't have solidarity, you're going to lose. ... Solidarity can never be perfect. It's imperfect. But … everybody has to somehow join forces.” —Arundhati Roy ([47:09])

9. Culture, Politics, and Protest

• The Role of Imagination and Civil Disobedience
  • Roy questions whether civil disobedience alone can work under unyielding regimes without real solidarity from the world ([50:42]).

    “Civil disobedience works when you have an audience, when that audience is sympathetic.” —Arundhati Roy ([50:42])

• Psychic Toll of Witnessing Atrocity
  • Roy describes the current moment as one of collective psychosis, forced to witness genocide in Gaza on our phones while feeling powerless ([54:03]).
  • She still believes in the necessity of action, protest, and telling the truth, regardless of winning or losing ([56:26]).

10. Love, Failure, and the Complexity of Closure

• Love Despite Everything

  • The book’s conclusion is an act of sharing her mother with the world, “all of her, the darkness and the light” ([61:43]).
  • Roy shares a poignant exchange—her mother’s late message:

    “There’s no one in the world whom I have loved more than you... it was a savage, thorny, violent sort of love. But it was love.” —Arundhati Roy ([61:33])

• On Failure and Hope

  • Roy reframes failure as not capitulating:

    “It means you may be defeated, but you'll never be on their side. You may go down, but you'll never be on their side.” —Arundhati Roy ([56:26])

• Manifesto for Life

  • Closing with her 1998 essay The End of Imagination, Roy reads her personal creed—a meditation on empathy, humility, and resistance:

    “Above all, to watch, to try and understand. To never look away and never, never to forget.” —Arundhati Roy ([63:44])

Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “I just left home because I wanted to continue to love her. And she was an impossible person to be around for me as her child.” —Arundhati Roy ([06:41])
• “My mother… grew so angry at what had happened to her. … All her rage against men, she took out on my brother.” ([11:32])
• “For me, the redeeming thing was that at least the public battles she fought for women, you know, were for me too. Not as a daughter, but as a woman.” ([11:32])
• "I learned to read the darkness, to stare at it until it gave up its secrets." ([24:51])
• “I'm celebrating as a successful writer, but actually I'm a deep failure. But fortunately, as you would read in Mother Mary, being friends with failure does not mean accepting it.” ([55:50])
• “A million times yes.” —Arundhati Roy, on whether she would choose being a writer again ([64:22])
• Manifesto ([63:44]):

  “To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. ... Above all, to watch, to try and understand. To never look away and never, never to forget.”

Timestamps for Major Segments

• Introduction & Legacy of Mary Roy [01:20 – 04:43]
• Writing Process & Grief [04:45 – 08:04]
• Mary Roy’s Story, Family Trauma [08:08 – 15:05]
• Literary Reflections: Fiction and Memory [17:05 – 21:27]
• Public vs. Private Feminism [21:27 – 24:51]
• Artistry & Early Life [30:40 – 36:03]
• Literary Success to Political Dissident [36:59 – 41:49]
• Threats, Courage, and Authoritarianism [41:50 – 48:39]
• Solidarity & The Limits of Civil Disobedience [47:09 – 50:42]
• Gaza and Global Witness [54:03 – 56:26]
• Failure, Legacy, and Closure [61:33 – 64:25]
• Roy’s Manifesto for Life [62:33 – 63:44]

Memorable Moments

• Roy reading from her own novels and noting that for her, language is “an audio track” ([36:03]).
• Describing the difference in her voice from early to late chapters in the audiobook, revealing rawness & vulnerability ([59:05]).
• Her brother’s take on her original dedication as the “only real fiction” in The God of Small Things ([60:39]).
• Roy’s “valiant organ child” metaphor, describing the emotional intensity of her bond with her mother ([27:21]).
• Host’s reflection on whether Roy’s childhood prepared her for a life as a writer, and her unhesitating affirmation ([64:22]).

Conclusion

This insightful episode interweaves the intensely personal with the fiercely political, painting a portrait of Arundhati Roy as both witness and chronicler of her times. Roy’s candor about her mother, her own formation, and her activism provides listeners with a window into how the private and public are never truly separate. The episode closes with Roy’s commitment to bearing witness—never looking away, never forgetting—even in the face of defeat. Her artistic and ethical manifesto is a call to resist, to remember, and to find solidarity in imperfection.