Book Club: Body of Word
About the Book Club
Body of Word is a quarterly book club hosted at Soma Haus — a gathering space for people to come together through books, conversation, and shared inquiry.
It's a space we've envisioned for some time: somewhere to read, to listen, to question, and to remember what it feels like to be moved by language. Each season, we choose one book together and gather to talk about it — not to perform our reading, but to sit with what the book has stirred in us.
This is a space for the curious, the half-finished readers, the lifelong re-readers, and everyone in between. No perspective is treated as too much or not enough.
Every Body of Word session runs on a pay-as-you-wish model.
70% of all contributions go to a beneficiary organisation thematically linked to the book we're reading that quarter.
30% supports Soma Haus’ Sliding Scale Program, which makes care accessible to those who need it most.
What Happens in each Session?
We will gather as a small group of 10 pax, including facilitators, at Soma Haus’ Joo Chiat location.
Each session opens with tea and time to settle. We begin with a short grounding — sometimes a breath, sometimes a brief somatic exercise — to help everyone arrive. The discussion is guided by a small set of questions shared in advance, so no one feels put on the spot. There may be an optional short writing or sharing exercise to close.
You don't need to have finished the book. Partial readers are warmly welcome — the questions are designed to work for both.
The session is suitable if you:
Enjoy reading, or want to come back to it
Are open to listening as much as speaking
Are curious about the questions a book can open, even if you don't have answers
Session Details
Book Highlight:
Mother Mary Comes To Me
Date:
19 September 2026
Time:
3.00 - 4.30 pm
Location:
Soma Haus Joo Chiat Outlet
Price:
Pay-as-you-wish
70% to will go to PAVE Integrated Services
30% will go towards Soma Haus’ Sliding Scale Program
About the Book*
Arundhati Roy's first memoir. An account of how she became the person and writer she is, shaped by circumstance but above all by her relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, whom she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”
Roy began writing after Mary's death in September 2022, unsettled by the intensity of her own response to the loss of a mother she left at eighteen, “not because I didn't love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.”
In a world where more of us are renegotiating the terms of our family relationships, what does it mean for a mother and daughter to meet in the middle?
The mother weight, and how daughters approach this at different stages of their lives
Intergenerational patterns of behaviour that are inherited through the matriarchal lineage and how we hope to approach them
The mother you know vs the mother the world knows
Grieving your mother, dead or alive
Roy writes plainly about the violence in her childhood home. We will hold that part of the book with care, and no one is expected to speak about their own.
*We won't be reading the whole book in the room. The discussion will centre on the sections where Roy sits with family dynamics and generational trauma, and where Mary Roy's founding of her school runs alongside her legal fight for women's inheritance rights.
About Our Beneficiary
Singapore's longest-running family violence specialist centre. Twenty-five years of sitting with survivors, with children who witnessed what they shouldn't have, and with the long work of repair.
Some of what we read together lives in the body long after the book closes. PAVE does the work of holding what a mother and daughter carry between them, and helping carry it differently.
70% of contributions from this session will go to PAVE and 30% will support Soma Haus’ Sliding Scale Programme.
About your Facilitators
Xin Yi is a counsellor at Soma Haus and a lifelong reader. Outside the clinic, she's part of the community at Casual Poet Library, a small independent library in Singapore, where she obsesses over books and occasionally volunteers as a librarian.
For Body of Word, she brings both threads of her life together: the reader's pleasure in being moved by language, and the therapist's instinct for holding what surfaces when we sit with different books.
Arathi Devandran is a writer and communications professional. Her creative non-fiction work sits at the intersection of identity, grief, and the personal essay, and has appeared in CNA, RIC Journal, Borderless, and the anthology Singapore At Home: Life Across Lines, among others. She is currently working on her first essay collection.
For Body of Word, she brings a reader's curiosity and a writer's instinct for the questions that live underneath a story. Writing and reading, for her, are inseparable — a continuous conversation between the self on the page and the self in the world, always in pursuit of what the human condition asks of us.