Reading Arundhati Roy's "Mother Mary Comes to Me" with the Asian Staff Forum

Ever since I joined the board of the Asian Staff Forum (ASF) at Stanford in 2020, I have had the great pleasure of re-launching and organizing an annual Book Club each academic year, in which members read a book of fiction or nonfiction that engages with Asian (American) culture and communities. (To read about a couple of my past Book Club experiences, click here and here.) This year I collaborated with my colleague Susie Chang, a fellow ASF Program Committee member, to select Arundhati Roy's best-selling memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025) as the reading for our 2026 ASF Book Club. 

Mother Mary Comes to Me has earned numerous accolades, including being named a Top Ten Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review and winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. The first work of memoir produced by Booker Prize-winning novelist Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me describes the author's tumultuous relationship with her mother from her childhood up until her mother's death in 2022. Publisher Simon & Schuster describes the work as “an intimate chronicle, ‘full of precise imagery and blistering emotional intelligence’ (The Washington Post), of the relationship between two women, a school teacher and a writer, who happen to be mother and daughter. Roy writes with a novelist’s unsettling ability to be inside her own story as well as outside it, simultaneously child and adult, attached and detached, protagonist and narrator. She describes how she came to be the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as ‘my shelter and my storm.'"

The Book Club met three times across May, June, and July, bringing together book lovers from across the ASF community. Each session was co-facilitated by volunteer ASF members, who created original discussion questions that sparked wide-ranging conversation about the book's themes, the author's unique writing style, and the striking impact of Roy's life story. It was a joy to read and discuss such a riveting work of literature alongside colleagues, and I look forward to continuing the tradition in the coming years!

From our first meeting of the 2026 Book Club on May 14, 2026.