Arundhati Roy grew up, as she writes in her new memoir, with a feeling of constant dread, a ‘cold moth on my heart’. She both loved and feared Mary, her eccentric and ruthless mother, who, when Roy was three, had walked out on her father and had started a school in a village in Kerala, despite being asthmatic and penniless. Capable of real cruelty and outbursts of terrible temper, her mother behaved ‘with the edginess of a gangster’. As soon as she could, while studying architecture in Delhi, Roy left home. She was just eighteen. She did not see or speak to her mother for seven years. Being a girl on her own attracted endless criticism and unwanted attention.

Many excellent memoirs have their roots in complicated relationships with tyrannical parents, but few have conveyed with such intensity the conflicting emotions of small children faced with a mother so wayward and so powerful. She was, writes Roy, ‘my shelter and my storm’. Sometimes there was very little to eat and the children became malnourished. When her mother’s asthma was bad, she willed her to live – ‘I became her lungs,’ she writes; when she shouted, Roy fled and hid. Both Roy and her brother were regularly beaten and threatened. With time, the battles shaped her, both as a writer and as a constant thorn in the side of India’s politicians.

After graduating as an architect, Roy lived on a beach in Goa and in a rooftop room in Delhi, surviving day by day, hemmed in by constant anxiety. She describes herself during this time as ‘a small person with spikes’. She did, however, have an obvious gift for friendship –