Nepal, Dec. 22 -- Arundhati Roy's memoir is a powerful account of her tumultuous relationship with her birth-giver and birth-place

'Get out of my house.'

'All my sickness is because of you.'

'You're a millstone around my neck.'

Arundhati Roy heard these admonitions from her mother over and over throughout her life.

This must be a singular, yet universal experience. There must be very few daughters who make it through life unscathed by their mothers. And vice-versa.

How many of our mothers look at us and see in us the potential of all of the lives they could have lived? How many resent us for it, or want us to live those lives in their stead? And how many of us look back at our mothers and imagine what they would have achieved had ...