The Present Moment and Arundhati Roy

Today I was going to write a light-hearted post about the relentless tide of exercise advice that comes to older women via social media, but found that given the present moment – a raging war in the Middle East, oil tankers burning, children in a school murdered from the sky, hundreds of people dying, thousand displaced – I could not.

This past year, the first for my sixth novel, A HOUSE FOR MISS PAULINE’s, was busy. As 2026 dawned I knew I would have to grapple with the ‘what next?’ question: Would I write another novel? Or was it time for non-fiction? I had already written 84,000 words of an environmental memoir, which had won the Hollick Arvon Prize in 2014 but had failed to find a publisher. Perhaps I should revisit that – 84,000 words seemed a lot of words to waste. So I dug it up and in rereading it, found the environmental parts on the boring side, but the chapters about my own life seemed rich. Hmm. Did I have the courage to write about Uptown Diana? At a book group visit for Miss Pauline, someone pointed out I have never written about my own social class. I agreed this was so, and quipped that I might have to migrate if I did. But a seed was planted.

I went back to that memoir last month, entirely conscious of the arrogance it called for, and started to sculpt it into something new, centred on my slave-owning ancestry (I think) and my relationship with my father (perhaps). I made a deal with myself: this book was for my son. I would never seek publication and therefore did not have to worry about how it would be received. Of course, I also said that about A HOUSE FOR MISS PAULINE as well. But this time, I told myself, I meant it.

I began to read and reread other memoirs. Richard Flanagan’s QUESTION 7, FI by Alexandra Fuller, and then Arundhati Roy’s memoir, MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME. Briefly, she’s an Indian writer who famously won the Booker Prize in 1997 with her first novel, THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS, which I read back then with the hope that the same thing would happen to me, if I ever managed to write a book which, at that point, was still 13 years in the future. Ms Roy writes of that experience in her memoir, and that led me to take THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS off my shelf.

So I was sitting outside, reading this book by a woman on the other side of the world, a woman in her sixties with a wholly different life to mine, her words reminding me why her novel had won the Booker Prize, when my phone chirped and I glanced at it: A speech made by Arundhati Roy on March 9, 2026 at a book function for MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME. I clicked on it. It was obviously taken with someone’s cell phone, Ms Roy’s figure was tiny behind the podium, a bit out of focus, her curls a grey cloud, her eyes shadowed. But her words were a tidal wave that reached me on a Caribbean island; me, avoiding writing about exercise, but also being too afraid to write about the present moment.

Perhaps Arundhati Roy was afraid, I don’t know, but it did not stop her speaking. She said in part: “I have something to say because I am my mother’s daughter and because I need to straighten my shoulders about the war that is about to consume the world. I know we’re here today to talk about MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME but how can we end the day without talking about those beautiful cities – Tehran, Isfahan and Beirut that are up in flames?”

I will stop here – but here’s the link so you can listen for yourself. Arundhati Roy's statement

I know she has already received criticism for saying she stands with Iran – easy for those watching to suggest the better words would have been ‘the Iranian people’ but I salute her courage, this woman with no fighter jets, no drones, no bombs, no battalions. Just herself, alone on a stage, words her only weapons, calling out the warmongers and the cowards who appease and mollify and turn their gaze away. If we are going to celebrate a ‘warrior ethos’ as the American Secretary of War insists we must, it is Arundhati Roy’s version the world needs now.

Me, I am done with male leadership – and by that I do not mean merely leadership by men. I mean a type of leadership that seems to be informed by video games, by a Top Gun type obsession – mine is bigger than yours - by leadership that reduces human beings to casualty lists and empty, beribboned ceremonies, that describes people of other nations as collateral damage – the American President kindly informed us that people die in war. The kind of leadership that believes might makes right, that punching people when they’re down, an unfair fight, a blow below the belt – all are good and necessary, even something to laugh and crow about. Such men should be nowhere near power, not anywhere on earth. Maybe I’d consider Mars as a home for them, in the phallic rockets, with no return ticket, leaving them to establish their hierarchies there and eat each other alive.