New Delhi, Aug. 28 -- Arundhati Roy makes a striking confession early on in her luminous new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. Explaining her reason for running away at the age of 16 from her home in Kerala and her mercurial mother, the renowned educationist Mary Roy, she writes, "We (she and her mother) settled on a lie. A good one. I crafted it-'She loved me enough to let me go.' That's what I said at the front of my first novel, The God of Small Things, which I dedicated to her." A tiny stab of fiction, framing a putative work of fiction.

When I meet Roy on a video call on a balmy August afternoon, it's the first thing we talk about. As she writes towards the end of the book, the late writer, and Roy's close friend, John Berger, never ...