By Miriam R. Kramer

Motherhood is one of the most written-about experiences, yet it never stops feeling fresh because every mother–child relationship is its own universe. Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy, Matriarch: A Memoir by Tina Knowles, and I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy form a powerful trio about identity, inheritance, and the complicated love that shapes who we become. Our mothers create us and we speak back to this experience, spending our lives figuring out how they made us who we are and vice versa. Together these volumes create a spectrum of maternal love, from distant to devoted to enmeshed.

Writer Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me is a luminous work that serves as the most brilliantly written of the three. Here the mother–daughter relationship is defined in great part by emotional distance and abuse. Roy’s mother, Mary, was a fierce activist who challenged discriminatory inheritance laws in India, founded a school, and built a life centered on independence and social change. As a child, Roy experienced her mother as strong, formidable, and verbally violent as Mary fought to make her own place separate from children or any male guardian figure in a very traditional, sexist world. Brilliant and emotionally mercurial, Mary Roy despised mediocrity and was happy to send her children off to boarding school.

In this memoir, we experience the feeling of growing up in the presence of a powerful figure whose life exists on a larger stage, as her daughter separates from her to match and even surpass her intellectual and political achievement. She notes in her memoir “Perhaps even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject. In these pages, my mother, my gangster, shall live. She was my shelter and my storm.”

Roy creates her own legend as an intense writer and political activist against and in reaction to the framework of her mother’s achievements. Their relationship evolves from separation to an intellectual and emotional reunion built on respect and recognition rather than warmth and unconditional love.

By contrast, Matriarch presents a mother–daughter relationship rooted in closeness, mentorship, and generational pride. Businesswoman and philanthropist Tina Knowles, most famously mother of global pop superstar and mononym, Beyoncé, writes about raising daughters in a household where creativity and ambition were nurtured from the beginning. She blends personal stories with broader, heartfelt themes of Black motherhood, resilience, and spiritual inheritance. Her approach is deeply intentional: she wanted to create a home where her daughters felt confident, supported, and encouraged to pursue any dreams.

What makes this relationship stand out is the sense of partnership between mother and her daughters: from Beyoncé and famous Solange to her niece, Angie Beyincé, and ersatz daughter, Kelly Rowland. Knowles sees the umbrella of motherhood not only as caregiving but also as active mentorship. She became a stylist, a manager, a supporter, and a guiding force who emphasized emotional closeness and daily involvement. She celebrates the joy of watching her children, biological or not, succeed, and the pride of seeing them carry forward and enrich her family legacy.

Knowles openly discusses the pressures of raising children in the public eye and the challenges of balancing marriage, her own evolving career in entertainment and fashion, and parenting. The love in this relationship is warm and visible, but it also involves sacrifice, and resilience. The mother–daughter bond here is empowering and collaborative, rooted in shared goals and mutual admiration.

I’m Glad My Mom Died presents a relationship that is the most nakedly manipulative of the three: one shaped by control, enmeshment, and final separation. Jennette McCurdy means to shock us with black humor. As a frustrated actress, her mother, Debra, was deeply involved in every aspect of her young daughter’s life, from her acting career to her eating habits to her sense of self.

Jennette details experiences of Debra’s manipulation, erratic mood swings, and invasive control that contributed to her own long-term trauma, including an eating disorder and other psychological struggles. Her mother’s emotional volatility made daily life feel like “walking a tightrope.” Debra micromanaged Jennette’s career as the ultimate stage mother, controlling her body and enforcing strict rules that blurred the line between parenting and possession. Despite the abuse, Jennette has noted that her family, including her brothers and grandfather, provided support and camaraderie, helping her navigate the aftermath of her mother’s death to find a sense of equilibrium.

Yet McCurdy still portrays her with empathy. She acknowledges her mother’s love alongside the harm she caused, revealing how complicated and contradictory such relationships can be. Her story becomes a common one of reclaiming identity—learning who she is after years of defining herself through her mother’s expectations.

Roy’s story explores one brilliant woman’s examination of a mother who broke the boundaries of her place and time in Indian society, discarding traditional versions of motherhood in the process. Knowles’s memoir celebrates the strength of closeness and strong maternal ties helping her daughters rise above and amidst a history of segregation and racism to achieve the mythology of the American dream. McCurdy’s memoir examines how she escaped the boundary blurring caused by a mentally ill stage mother to create her own escape route to a stable sense of self. The journey to understand our mothers, as always, becomes part of the journey to understand ourselves so that we can have agency over our lives and shape our own narratives.

About the Author: Miriam Kramer worked at Olsson’s Books & Records before it closed in 2008, welcoming Old Town, Alexandria, residents to a unique place where employees with encyclopedic knowledge of literature and music enriched the community. As a global nomad, she has lived, studied, or worked in diverse countries overseas. With her experience writing and studying international affairs, she has promoted democracy, international media, the arts, peace building, and citizen diplomacy during her career.