Debbie Roth’s Reviews > Mother Mary Comes to Me > Status Update

That first night in a Mrs. Roy–less world, I spun unanchored in space with no coordinates. I had constructed myself around her. I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her. I had never wanted to defeat her, never wanted to win. I had always wanted her to go out like a queen. And now that she had, I didn’t make sense to myself anymore.

When I was old enough to understand, she described to me the various ways in which she had tried to induce an abortion. The least horrifying was eating lots of green papaya; the most horrifying involved a wire coat hanger. It wasn’t a nice thing for a mother to tell her daughter, but I sensed that she was warning me about drifting into a life of marriage and children without thinking it through carefully.

John Berger could have written a book called Ways of Listening. He listened with his whole body. As though my words were rain, and he was the earth. He absorbed everything, gathered every drop, missed absolutely nothing. His listening eyes were lakes in the high mountains. It was love, there’s no other word for it. I don’t think that stillness, that quality of attention, is even possible in digital-age humans…

I finally read the letter she had written to me asking me to make sure that she wasn’t put on life support. I was grateful that I hadn’t seen it earlier and followed her instructions, because she lived for fifteen years after coming off that ventilator.

The day she was moved from the ICU to a room of her own, the hospital lifts were not working, so she had to be carried up the stairs on a stretcher. It was like a scene from Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, in which a group of men carry a small ship over a mountain. The hospital stairwell looked like the last, difficult leg of a punishing pilgrimage.

I had to go into the courtroom alone. I was given one last chance to be a Reasonable Man and apologize. I politely declined. I was sentenced to a day in prison and ordered to pay a small fine, failing which I would have to remain in jail for six months.

Another part of “The Greater Common Good” the judges were particularly exercised by was my suggestion that giving cash as compensation to displaced people who belonged to indigenous tribes—people who lived outside the money economy and had, in the official resettlement policy, been explicitly promised “land for land”—was the equivalent of paying Supreme Court judges their salaries in fertilizer bags.

It was thrilling to win the Booker Prize. But the weeks of hysteria around the short-listed authors, the bets that were being laid on us by bookies, the grand banquet at which only one of us would be announced as the winner, made me feel more like a horse than a writer. A racehorse who, despite being coached by G. Isaac, ended up wanting nothing more than to win.

Just that brief meeting of eyes, the exchange of greetings, the myriad variations of “Could you please sign this for my…” that revealed something to me about their lives, their loves, their friendships and relationships. It made me realize how literature can join humans in a bond of quiet intimacy the way almost nothing else can.

Mrs. Roy was both thrilled and upset at the attention I was receiving. Thrilled because I was a former student of her school and that was something to be showcased. Upset because I was her daughter and she felt that I was being given more attention than was good for me, and certainly more than I deserved. (Which was absolutely true.)