Mother Mary Comes To Me

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

Reading a memoir can be a daunting thing, especially if you know nothing about the author/subject. On the one hand, it could inspire you to find out more about the subject: read their books, listen to their music, watch their films, etc. On the other hand, it could also deter you from adventuring down this unknown avenue, depending on how well the memoir is written or if the subject’s story is one that is appealing or relatable.

And then sometimes you sit flat in the middle of the road between the two. This was my experience with this month’s book club read: Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy.

Mother Mary Comes To Me chronicles the emotional, environmental, and circumstantial events that shaped Arundhati Roy into the woman and writer that she is today, with many of her life’s most significant events either directly involving or drawing her mind to her mother whom she describes as both her “shelter and storm”. From a turbulent relationship stems an eye-opening and almost impossible mother-daughter love story between two strong, defiant, and inspiring Indian women.

I was not aware of any of Roy’s work before reading this book. And while I found Mother Mary Comes To Me to be an engaging and truly amazing book of love, admiration, and incredible narratives, I cannot honestly say that I am itching to get myself a copy of The God of Small Things or The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

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The book’s poignancy comes from the respect with which Roy writes about her mother, even when she is describing moments of abuse, drama, or neglect. Throughout its chapters, the book changes tone with the telling of different, incredible life narratives from Roy ranging from studying architecture, becoming an actress, and laughing off the ridiculous arguments that powerful men put forward for her arrest. While the tone changes from anecdotal, to mocking, to reminiscent, throughout the entire book there is this underlying current of love and respect for her mother that carries the book along and through it, the book also becomes a little bit of a memoir of Mary Roy as well. We learn about this strong-willed Indian woman who opened a school, took down/reshaped inheritance laws, and built a community around herself despite her loud and dramatic personality. What keeps you turning the pages is the way in which Roy writes about these seriously scary events that either she or her mother were at the centre of: there is a distinct lack of fear, almost nonchalance, in her descriptions of her court appearances, her traversing jungles with guerilla fighters, and way in which authorities tried to silence her or her mother. It’s awesome.

While it hasn’t completely inspired me to rush right out and acquire Roy’s fictional or non-fictional collection of works, Mother Mary Comes To Me has made me glad that I now know that these awesome women are real.

Author: Arundhati Roy, 2025

Published: Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House UK, 2025

Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls

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After the exciting reading experience that was Daisy Darker, I’ve been running on a bit of a literary adrenaline-pinch. You know that feeling when you read a book that you enjoy so much that it re-addicts you to the feel of reading? I’ve had that all week. The next book on the pile on my bedside table was a work of non-fiction belonging to my partner, which he recommended I read before we released it into the wild to find a new home. So the excess adrenaline I had from Daisy Darker has been successfully sunk into David Sedaris’ Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls.

A series of random chapters that chronicles random scenes and moments of Sedaris’ life, the book is a little bit memoir and a little bit think-piece, but all entirely funny and fascinating. While Sedaris chooses to focus on small, seemingly unimportant anecdotes to share with the reader, the common thread of each chapter is that it explores Sedaris’ relationship with the world its inhabitants. From dissuading a telemarketer from sending him a cellphone, but hoping that he’ll call again to chat, to bonding with his sister and father over a colonoscopy, Sedaris shapes each episode into something of a love story; exploring the different loves of partners, families, and society.

Despite never getting to the Chekhov’s diabetes of the title (the owls make an appearance though), Sedaris’ book is an interesting and down-to-earth memoir that feels like having a friend over for coffee and just catching up. The jagged and random series of events chronicled are enjoyable and light conversation, while simultaneously doing what human discussions do and trying to make sense of the world on a deeper level. The idea that, despite centuries of novels, poems, songs, and theses, we still don’t have a solid grasp on how our world and its inhabitants affect us and our relationships, is very subtly underlying each story. More so as Sedaris reminisces of times gone by when childhoods were so different to the ones of today, how our relationship with technology has changed, and sexuality and gender identities were a little less confusing.

Image credit: Erie Reader

Overall, I enjoyed this book. The prose is simple and conversational with smatterings of slightly judgmental humour colouring the chapters. There are some scenes in which I couldn’t tell if the opinions put forward were indeed the author’s own, or a voice adopted to reflect society, and while these scenes sometimes made me uncomfortable (namely a scene talking about trans people, and then reinstating Jesus Christ as the king of the world), for the most part I powered through this book quick enough and found myself compelled by the author’s voice and the stories he was telling.

Author: David Sedaris, 2013

Published: Abacus (Great Britain), 2013

How We Love

 

Image credit: Allen & Unwin

Continuing with the stack of post-lockdown titles that I had been keenly waiting for, this week I entered the world of Clementine Ford. I witnessed her love, lose, crush, and grow in her latest book, How We Love.

If you’ve read Fight Like a Girl and Boys Will Be Boys, then you’re probably used to the passionate and factual narratives about gender that Clementine Ford has become known for. How We Love is a definite step in the opposite direction, however it is no less passionate or important than her previous works. 

Beginning with a confronting chapter about her relationship with her mother and watching her battle with cancer, How We Love is a series of love stories depicting key romantic and love-filled relationships that have shaped Ford into the beautiful woman she is. Mostly memoir, but also personal exploration into the strange methods of acting on and recognising love (rather like a lengthy thought-piece), it’s a book that’s filled with feeling, reflections, and understanding. 

Image credit: The Guardian

What I loved about this book, the thing that kept me turning the pages at a machine-gun pace, was Ford’s incredible ability to put frustratingly incomprehensible feelings (like anxiety) into words, structured sentences, and crisp images. I was impressed and awed by Ford’s poeticism as well as her incredible talents in observation of her environment and herself. To then be able to succinctly put these observations and feelings into a string of profound and beautiful sentences made me question by own abilities as a writer. There’s rawness to Ford’s prose, making all her stories relatable and thus sparking the feels in the reader. 

If you’re a fan of Clementine Ford, then I would absolutely recommend How We Love: it’s warm, real, and (mostly) reassuring. It’s a book filled with love and hope, needed now at the end of the world. 

Author: Clementine Ford, 2021

Published: Allen & Unwin, NSW, 2021

Journeys to the Other Side of the World

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As I’ve said before, voyeurism is the primary attraction of literature for many people and while fiction, truly, is a wondrous way to have exciting and magic experiences without ever leaving the comfort of your couch, I would recommend that people give non-fiction a go for the same reasons. While most people see non-fiction as expositional or educational and only bother if they’re invested in the subject matter, I am here to say that those people are missing out and that you can have the same magical voyeuristic experiences while reading about places that exist right outside your door.

This week, my adventure from the Shelf spanned across New Guinea, Australia, and Madagascar with Sir David Attenborough’s Journeys to the Other Side of the World.

Following on from his earlier memoirs that chronicle three earlier ‘zoo quests’, this book sees Attenborough and Charles Lagus travel across the globe in search of exotic animals to film and capture, as well as strange and fascinating aboriginal lifestyles to document. While Adventures of a Young Naturalist was all about the animals (with a few human interactions thrown in), this book focuses just as much on the various races and tribes of people that populate the planet with their own religions, ceremonies, and ways of surviving in lush or harsh landscapes.

Attenborough’s sophisticated prose and expositional style of writing, intermingled with various personal tones, opinions, and anecdotes, continues to blend the line between boring naturalist textbook and stimulating non-fictional read. Each chapter of the book is a reminder that there are stories and characters out there in the real world that are just as fascinating and funny as those from an author’s imagination.

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While the book is not, admittedly, stimulating the entire way through –there are some areas that, unless you’re very interested in the subject matter, become a little dry and require perseverance- the majority of its pages are filled with interesting facts, stories, anecdotes, and characters that are sure to spark interest and imagination; maybe even spark a desire to travel to a few of these places and see them for oneself. This is what makes it a good book.

Journeys to the Other Side of the World is a collection of memoirs written by Sir David Attenborough –taken from journal entries- and compiled into a complete novel. The three ‘zoo quests’ contained are Quest in Paradise, Zoo Quest to Madagascar, and Quest Under Capricorn. It was first published in 1891 by Lutterworth Press as Journeys to the Past: Travels in New Guinea, Madagascar, and the Northern Territory of Australia and was rereleased as Journeys to the Other Side of the World in 2018 by Two Roads.

Eggshell Skull

Image credit: Allen & Unwin

The primary draw of reading is the voyeurism that the experience promises. It’s a delectable, exciting, and a little naughty feeling that comes with looking over the fence at a world that you’re not a part of, just sneaking a peek. Of course these experiences offer readers excitement, drama, and ethical conundrums to work through, stimulating their brains every which way but loose. Then sometimes there are those books that hit too close to home, that immerse you in such a way that the anxieties and drama and horrors feel as though they are actually happening to you, making the feelings of depression, panic, and anger hells real. I had this experience this week, reading Eggshell Skull.

A memoir by Bri Lee about living with trauma, coming to terms with its severity, and then mustering the courage to stand up and fight back against it, Eggshell Skull is brutal, searing, and quite remarkable. The last time that I felt this emotionally affected by the central character was The Girl on the Train. Lee’s story of battling against a one-sided legal system, seeing the heartbreaking repetitiveness of rape and assault cases as a judge’s associate, and fighting against her own depression and post traumatic stress, is one that provides readers with an inspiring reading experience as well as a wholly depressing one.

Being a memoir, the book holds this beautiful bare-all tone as Lee writes in an everyday vocabulary and manages to put highly personal and emotional feelings and scenarios into words that an audience can fathom. We all know it’s near impossible to voice how we’re feeling (especially if we’re depressed or irrationally terrified), but Lee does a wonderful job, and it’s her voice and her words that immerse the reader and give her book the incredibly moving reading experience it does to its audience.

Every step of the way, I went through the feelings that Lee was describing; the empathic part of my brain whirring on overdrive. I was angry and having loud rants to myself when she described the absurdity and incompetence of the system, I could see myself drinking as she does, and feel those feelings of insecurity and hopelessness. One might argue that this is not the reading experience that people want, but right here and right now, I’m telling you it’s the one that we deserve!

Image credit: Courier Mail

Despite a lot of its content, Lee’s book is not about taking down the system, or necessarily being an angry feminist pointing out the inconsistencies, lurches, and harsh imbalances between gender representations in the legal system. What Lee’s book did for me was openly say that you can talk about your feelings because it’s guaranteed that someone out there feels just like you. Yes we’re all different, but on a number of levels we are all the same, therefore the bad feelings that we feel have been felt by someone before and can be spoken about: people will understand.

I want to thank you, Bri, for your wonderful book.

Eggshell Skull is a memoir by Bri Lee chronicling her year in the legal system as a judge’s associate, and then three years as a complainant. It was written in 2018 and published by Allen & Unwin.

Adventures of a Young Naturalist

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This week on the Couch I’ve decided to take a break from the world of fantasy and opt for something fascinating, educational, and real: David Attenborough’s memoirs, Adventures of a Young Naturalist.

This intriguing and eloquently written book chronicles three key expeditions at the beginning of Attenborough’s career in which he, Charles Lagus, and Jack Lester travelled around the globe to film exotic animals in their natural habitat, as well as capture some to bring back to the London Zoo. The expeditions were called ‘Zoo Quest’ and this book covers the first three in which the trio travel to Guyana, Komodo to find the legendary Dragons, and Paraguay to find giant armadillos.

A blend of modern history as well as autobiographical stories and anecdotes, Adventures of a Young Naturalist is the perfect fusion of educational and entertaining literature. Attenborough’s recognisable voice serves as a wondrous inner narrator, which makes the stories and bouts of exposition all the more accessible and digestible because it causes the book to read more like an intellectual dinner conversation rather than a dry heap of history and lectures.

Attenborough’s prose is beautifully structured and infused with a distinctive ‘documentary narrator’s’ vibe as well as a number of more personal descriptions of his adventures, which makes the reading experience all the more enjoyable. The book’s division into three parts, each detailing the adventures upon three different journeys, helps to break up the monotony that always sits on the fringes of non-fiction works (especially ones that chronicle history) and the photographs that are also included serve as a wonderfully refreshing break from the (admittedly) long stream of narrative.

Image credit: Daily Mail

Despite the majority of the adventures being quite fascinating and inspiring feelings of reflective/sympathetic hope, disappointment, and desperation in the reader, the book can on occasion become a little wordy; making the reader take in the words on the page without really penetrating the meaning or feelings behind them, but aside from that one downside Adventures of a Young Naturalist is a captivating book, definitely a must-read for fans of Attenborough and his wonderful BBC Earth documentaries.

Adventures of a Young Naturalist is a collection of memoirs from Sir David Attenborough, compiled from various notes and journal entries over many years (1955, 1957, and 1959) and first published as a complete novel by Lutterworth Press in 1980 (Zoo Quest Expeditions: Travels in Guyana, Indonesia and Paraguay). This edition was first published in 2017 by Two Roads.