Memoir isn’t my favorite literary genre, so I’m surprised that I have read two memoirs in the past few weeks. One is a current bestseller, and the other is becoming a classic, if anything can achieve such status in less than 15 years. I’m speaking of Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me (Scribner 2025) and Joy Harjo’s Crazy Brave: A Memoir (W. W. Norton 2012). Why did I choose these books? I bought Mother Mary Comes to Me in hardback because it looked so beautiful on the bestseller’s table at my local Barnes and Noble. Also, because I loved The God of Small Things (Random House 1997) and Roy’s short stories. I read Crazy Brave because it’s the March selection of the Tulsa Flyer book club. (If you don’t know the Tulsa Flyer, please stop reading now and subscribe to the Flyer! It’s free, and they are making a real splash for nonprofit journalism in Tulsa.)
At first glance, the two books have nothing in common. Both women are Indian, but not in the same sense. Roy’s book is driven by pressing issues in today’s world, while Harjo’s finds its roots in traditional culture. Mother Mary Comes to Me follows a continuous narrative line. Crazy Brave interlaces the story of Harjo’s early experience in Tulsa and Santa Fé with songs, dream sequences, and mythical stories. Harjo’s mother figure is beloved but passive. Roy’s mother, a history-maker for women’s rights in India, rips through the narrative aflame with anger and purpose. Although Harjo is 10 years older than Roy, Crazy Brave only tells the story of her young life, whereas Roy’s memoir carries through to the present day.
On closer inspection, the books share a dark undertow. They depict poverty, subjugation, and sexual brutalization as pervasive female experiences. Both women’s stories include destitution and unplanned pregnancy, conditions of which women are still taught to be profoundly ashamed, but neither author expresses embarrassment or engages in self-justification. Both narrate the events pragmatically as fully integrated into their life stories. Both speak of intense, almost wild determination to make their mark in the world. Harjo embraces this characteristic in her label, “crazy brave.” (“Harjo” means “crazy” in her Muskogee language).
Ultimately, both women’s stories affirm a similar throughline: their creativity rescued them from defeat. Both women faced near-misses, dire threats, and all-but-insurmountable challenges to their survival that have defeated and even ended the lives of countless other women. In Roy’s and Harjo’s stories, creative engagement with multiple artistic media literally kept them alive because it demonstrated to them and to others their inherent worth. Both women began in visual art. Both engaged in various ways with music and subsequently became writers. Neither woman attempts to account for the creative vision they possess, but both imply that, without it, they would not have survived.
My reflection on Crazy Brave and Mother Mary Comes to Me sharpens my attention to the risk and redemption that drive these stories. Wealth is so fetishized in the U.S. that poverty often goes unnoticed. When it does come under scrutiny, it’s in the form of the “homelessness problem” that should be “cleaned up,” or viewed as a chronic condition that only afflicts certain sectors of society. We see little recognition of the vast number of now self-sufficient women who endured genuine poverty through parts of their lives.
Our society’s success in obscuring violence against women treats it as rare and situationally motivated, the exception to the rule. When it does occur, conventional wisdom suggests, it must have been provoked. The implication is that women are inherently flawed in the first place and therefore naturally prone to victimization—in other words, we blame the victim. In a culture that views the arts as optional luxuries available to wealth and privilege, the life experiences of Arundhati Roy and Joy Harjo demonstrate the necessity of art for survival. Their stories press the realization that this is literally true; that physical survival can depend directly on the opportunity to create, and on the power of telling the story.
I felt troubled by both books and, initially, couldn’t say why. At first, I thought it had to do with writing style or the organization of narrative. It took time to understand that my unease arose from the desperate situations these women faced, both of whom I highly esteem as writers and public figures. I realized that their stories left me with a sense of obligation. I feel a responsibility to honor their honest telling in some meaningful way that acknowledges the overwhelming barriers most women face on their path to womanhood. And isn’t this a compelling reason for each of us to tell our stories, despite the judgments and dismissals they will almost certainly attract? I’m not sure I’ll read more memoirs any time soon, but I am glad I read these.
