Book Club Night Kit

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Arundhati Roy

Cozy night

Arundhati Roy turns from fiction and essays to the one story she had been circling all along: her mother. It is a tender, funny, bruising memoir about love that never quite fits comfortably in the room.

Chai, Appam, and Our Complicated Mothers

Come for Kerala comfort food and Arundhati Roy's memoir about the mother she could never quite escape or stop loving. Soft clothes encouraged, finished or unfinished readers welcome.

Reading level: Moderate Pages: 224

Best for: A club that likes memoirs about family, does not mind a few teary pauses, and stays late talking about their own mothers

Discussion

Warm-up

1.Before we talk about Roy's mother, tell us one small thing about a woman who raised you: a phrase she repeated, a dish she made, a rule she would not bend.
2.Where did you read this one, and did you find yourself reading it in small sips or in one long sitting? What did the book's pace do to your evenings?

Digging in

1.This is a love story told by someone who was also exhausted by the person she loves. Which passage made you soften toward Roy's mother, even if you had just been annoyed with her?
2.Roy writes Kerala with heat, rain, water and church bells all pressing in. Which sense stayed with you longest, and did any of it remind you of a place you grew up in?
3.The book moves between a daughter who is a child and a daughter who is a famous adult. Which version of that voice did you most want to put a blanket around?
4.Roy's mother built a school and insisted on her own terms in a world that preferred quiet women. How did reading about that kind of stubbornness make you feel: thrilled, tired, both?

Going deep

1.By the last pages, had your sense of what Roy was forgiving (or refusing to forgive) shifted? Talk about the feeling that arrived in you, not what happens on the page.
2.If you could sit with your own complicated person for one hour and say one true, kind thing, what would it be? This book seems to want that from its readers.

On the table & to sip

To eat

Kerala egg roast with soft appam

Homey Syrian Christian breakfast food from Roy's corner of Kerala, warm, coconutty and easy to make in one pan for a crowd.

Banana fritters (pazham pori)

The classic Kerala tea-time snack, fried, sweet and comforting, perfect passed around on a tray mid-conversation.

Spiced coconut-jaggery rice pudding

A gentle, nursery-warm dessert that matches the book's tenderness and can be made the night before and reheated.

To sip

Masala chai with extra cardamom (no alcohol)

The non-alcoholic anchor of the night: brewed in a big pot, poured all evening, the drink of long kitchen-table talks.

Tender coconut water with lime (no alcohol)

Cool, soft and unmistakably Kerala, a nice break between the fried things and the feelings.

Hot toddy with palm jaggery and clove

A nod to Kerala's toddy-shop tradition, served warm in small mugs for the slower second half of the evening.