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Reading Arundhati Roy is like exploring the labyrinths of a brilliant, but disruptive, mind that refuses to settle into the tidy certainties of tradition and expectations. I have always looked upon Arundhati as something of an enigma, and I started reading ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’ hoping to understand her better. A Booker Prize winner, she has often seemed angry, even irritable, determined to push every boundary, but strangely elusive.

And yet this is only one side of her. She has also stood shoulder-to-shoulder with those fighting for a cause, displaying immense courage in challenging authority, and provoking debate. She has never hesitated in using her celebrity to amplify the struggles of those resisting injustice.

Success, in Arundhati’s case, does not seem to draw her towards the easy warmth of public approbation; if anything, it appears to thicken the veil of privacy around her. What is fascinating is that she who shuns the public gaze, lays herself unabashedly bare in the pages of her latest book – a memoir that is unapologetic and unfiltered in exposing her vulnerabilities, contradictions, rebellions, and the role of her formidable, yet remarkable, mother during her formative years.

All her insecurities, eccentricities, pain and angst are traced unwaveringly to her relationship with her mercurial mother, renowned educationist and women’s rights activist Mary Roy. “She was my shelter and my storm,” Arundhati claims plaintively in this memoir that exposes her tumultuous relationship with her mother, whom she describes in an interview as “a woman who was amazing, and also very, very dark.”

Trained at an early age not to react to the jibes and humiliation directed at her through the manipulations of a ‘crazy, violent single parent’, Arundhati declares she grew up confused about what she wanted, and scared of secure places and relationships. “Once again for me, the safest place became the most dangerous one. Once again, I made it so… my behaviour was inexplicable even to myself.” In an interview, Arundhati admits, “I naturally gravitate to the unsafe.”

There is total candour in Roy’s writing, but at times the act of confession morphs into spectacle. The narrative is peppered with anecdotes clearly designed to provoke or shock: the young Roy peeing in the gardens of rich homes, her bed tea and breakfast with the maimed beggars of her residential area, the “old man Santa” who groped her, a young man in a bus pressed against her, the grand-uncle in Delhi stroking her back commenting on her not wearing a bra, and of course, when she first sees her father in a Delhi hotel, “He was lying on his stomach with his knees bent, his feet waving at the ceiling.”

Some of these moments described in her trademark caricaturing style, feel so bizarre that you wonder whether they are faithful memories, deliberate exaggeration, or performative. The reader is left wondering if some scenes are meant to titillate as much as take the narrative forward. For long stretches – especially from the time she leaves home, goes on to study architecture and beyond -- the book circles back to Roy herself with a relentless self-preoccupation that begins to test the reader’s patience.

You have almost given up, but just when you begin to feel that the memoir is sinking under the weight of its own self-absorption, it steadies itself.

The latter half redeems the book.

Now the narrative moves beyond the dramatics of Arundhati’s rebellious younger self into the larger world she has engaged with fiercely. Her activism, writings on development, displacement and state power, brushes with the law, a night in jail, the time she spent traveling with guerilla fighters to understand the Maoist insurgency from the ground, and her standing with the Narmada Bachao activists and displaced villagers – the memoir now gains depth as the writing sharpens with the gaze turning outward.

Roy writes with the bluster and astuteness that have always been her hallmark, and have made her the formidable public voice she is. She is playful, irreverent, sometimes rebellious and irreverent, at other times accusatory and morally outraged. Her keen observations and wit are irresistible to the reader, even as she firmly remains the hero of her own narrative.

The memoir is most moving in the pages that talk about the final years of her mother. The tone becomes vulnerable, and morphs into that of a daughter grappling with loss, her memories and the complicated relationship she shares with her mother.

Do I understand Arundhati better now after reading this memoir? I think I do. If anything, the book offers clues to the contradictions that have defined her public persona. The eccentricities, the deliberate courting of centrestage in rebellious causes, and yet the refusal to inhabit stages that others covet, the air of elusiveness she carefully maintains, fierce independence, the impatience with authority, the defiance and the simmering anger – can all be traced back to her childhood. The child she once was can be glimpsed in the woman she is today – curious, questioning, rebellious, unwilling to submit to tropes or to expectations placed on her. As she says in an interview, “As a child, I had a very adult mind… so maybe there is something childlike about me as an adult.”

One of the most striking qualities of the book is how disarmingly raw Arundhati chooses to be, without trying to soften memory or tidy up any embarrassments of awkward experiences or uncomfortable moments. And yet, it is that unapologetic bareness that raises the question – how much honesty is too much honesty? Memoirs after all are not just all about memory – they are also about craft. The story, in order to gain resonance beyond the self, needs to arrive with some filter so as not to overwhelm the reader. The very quality that makes a memoir most startlingly alive, can also make it occasionally exhausting. Would a little restraint have sharpened the memoir further?