The Patron Saint of Liars

“Forgiveness was at the heart of everything. Because I could not ask, I could not be forgiven. What would be the point in confessing a sin for which you had guilt but no remorse? Bless me, father, for I have sinned, I have lied to my husband, left him never knowing he will have a child, and would do it all again in a heartbeat. Bless me, for I will continue to lie until I go the way of all the earth. Bless me in the absence of remorse.”

The only identity Rose is ever able to fully inhabit is that of a liar. Though she feels guilty for lying to Thomas, she views it as something she must do to survive. She makes a distinction between guilt and remorse, stressing that she feels no remorse—or regret—about her lies. This quote emphasizes how unhappy she is in her role as Thomas’s wife and how desperate she is to escape it.

“‘People think it’s the other way around, that the ugly girls, the plain girls even, they’re the ones to feel sorry for. But they don’t have so many’—she stopped and pushed her eyebrows together, trying to think of the word—‘distractions, I guess. There will always be people there to tell a pretty girl what she should be doing or thinking. At the counter, it’s the pretty girls you can always sell the most to. They never know their minds.’”

Both Helen and Rose are very beautiful women, and they bond over this. The idea of pretty girls being more insecure than other people and not knowing what they want out of their lives foreshadows Rose’s marriage to Thomas and her attitude to her pregnancy. She is confused and indecisive and never seems to feel completely at peace with any of her choices.

“I tried to talk to her, to tell her about the pain in my chest that could be eased only by a drive, to tell her that May reminded me so much of October and this year of last year, but I couldn’t say things I didn’t have the words for yet. All I was sure of was that I loved her, her red lipstick, her delicate hands. Sometimes I drove all the way to San Diego but would only stand in the accessories department, watching her over a counter of scarves while she told another woman how to be beautiful.”

Despite having a close relationship with Helen, Rose is never able to be completely honest with her about the “ugly” parts of her life. Unable to have meaningful conversations with her mother, she resorts to her favorite pastime: watching her mother’s performative behavior that focuses on beauty and perfection.

“‘I’ll give her up,’ I said, and went out to the car. The second I said it I knew that would be my penance, the worst thing I could bear. I was doing a terrible thing, but I would pay the price. If I gave up the thing I loved most in the world, then maybe God would respect my desperation.”

When Rose decides to leave Thomas without revealing to him that she is pregnant with their child, she feels that she must punish herself for this act that will undoubtedly cause him a lot of pain. So, she decides to cut her mother out of her life, which is the most devastating thing that can happen to her. As a result, her freedom comes at an extremely high cost—a fact that she is reminded of daily since she misses her mother terribly and the pain of this prevents her from connecting with her own daughter.

“Angie sighed, like she was tired of girls from California being so stupid. ‘When you leave you tell everyone a lie. You tell them you’re going to take care of your sick aunt, or you won a trip to Europe or something, then you come back six months later and get back your job and have dinner at your parents’ house and see your old boyfriend and everything’s just the way it was. Just exactly the way it was.’”

While Rose is the character who is most associated with lying in this novel, all the characters lie in some capacity. Many of the girls at Saint Elizabeth’s lie to their friends back home about where they are going when they come there in secret to have their babies. Angie explains that the lies they tell allow them to go back to their old lives. However, this is different from the reason Rose lies, which is to escape the life she previously lived.

“I could go to I. Magnin’s, where my mother would be selling lipsticks, and stand on the other side of the counter in my big winter coat, which would be far too warm, and she wouldn’t notice this baby. All she would see was her baby. The joy on her face. I closed my eyes and savored it. I wanted to never comfort. I wanted to be comforted. I wanted to be wrapped and held and kissed and rocked.”

When Rose decides to keep Sissy, she feels like she must give up her role as a daughter—someone who will be cared for—and instead move into a caretaking role. However, she resents this move and feels ill-prepared for it; she desires nothing more than to be cared for by her own mother.

“I was a tenement building, a place to live. It made me hungry and tired and sick. It made my hair thick and my skin pink. At night I would lie on my back and run my hands tentatively across the great expanse of my skin. It wasn’t my own life anymore, it was a life splintered off from mine. It would grow beyond me. It would need so badly to grow it would leave my body and go into the arms of that good mother who would raise it, watch over it, turn on night-lights, wait for its cry. It would reach for her breasts instead of mine.”

In this quote, Rose describes her experience of her pregnancy. She expresses how being pregnant makes her feel unfamiliar to herself; her physical changes are estranging and uncomfortable. She feels no affection for her child, referring to her baby as “it,” as if it were an object, and she wishes that she could surrender it to a “good mother” who isn’t her. Rose’s hands-off approach continues after Sissy is born.

“Beatrice turned her head to the side. The light sounds she made seemed almost like desire, as if things had come full circle, and her face again contorted the way it had that night nine months ago.”

Despite the novel being filled with pregnant women, it mentions very little regarding the conception of any of the children. Beatrice’s birth is eye-opening for many of the girls and bridges the gap between sex and parenthood.

“You don’t have to tell me about the father. That’s your own business. As far as I’m concerned, we start from right now, right this minute. Whatever’s in the past belongs to you. Private.”

Rose does not like to wonder about the future, nor can she stand to think about her past. As a result, Son’s insistence that their life will start afresh when they get married appeals to her. This quote also reflects Son’s love for Rose since he accepts her wholeheartedly, without reservation. Also, it shows his own hesitation about discussing the past, given his own traumatic past.

“This girl was to be one of them, this daughter of mine. The one her cousins would whisper about, the one who finds out years later, just by accident, that she is not herself at all. Was it not for so many bits of fate fallen into our laps, my daughter would have been someone else’s daughter.”

Son realizes that many of the unpleasant and difficult things that happened to him as a teenager led him to being Sissy’s father. However, he is aware that at any moment, all the lies that have created this new life for him could be revealed and Sissy could be taken away from him.

“For Sissy to be mine I had to make her mine, and I’d done that. But for Rose it was all supposed to come natural. Sissy looked too much like whoever it was Rose’d left behind, so in a funny way, it was more her that got reminded of the past than me.”

Son is not Sissy’s biological father, but he still has a close bond with her. This is why he is surprised and disappointed that Rose cannot bond with her child; he assumes that maternal affection should come easily to her—this assumption reveals his traditional views about motherhood. However, he reasons that Rose struggles with Sissy since Sissy looks like her biological father. As a result, Rose is constantly reminded of the past and struggles to make peace with it.

“You never think about getting old when you’re seventeen. You never think about how it’s all going to turn out, that you’ll have a wife and a daughter and a job that takes up every waking hour. When you’re seventeen, there isn’t anything past a good spot on the football team.”

Son’s accident at 17 ruins his future with Cecilia and his career in the armed forces. In this quote, he reflects on how this incident that occurred at such a young age has defined so much of his life.

“I thought about the two of them, both past sixty and finally getting to have a baby of their own. I was glad for them. I could see it was no burden. But still, I wished it wasn’t my baby they had.”

Both June and Sister Evangeline are two of the most maternal characters in the novel, yet neither has children of their own. They welcome Sissy into their lives and love it when Rose leaves the baby in their care. However, Son struggles to share his child with them, wishing that Sissy could be cared for by her mother.

“But it never occurred to me that I could have come not to want her. That wasn’t the way it worked between us. I wanted her and she decided. That was the way things went.”

Son’s relationship with Cecilia is extremely toxic, but it falls into a pattern: Cecilia always gets to choose when she leaves him, leaving him heartbroken. Ultimately, she continues this pattern by dying in front of him, leaving him forever.

“Over the years I came to live with this, came to believe even that maybe there was a difference between killing someone and watching them die.”

Son is never completely certain if he could have saved Cecilia if he had tried to rescue her earlier. As a result, for years, he feels like he has killed Cecilia.

“I stood there with my hands folded. The town stood on one side of the open grave and we stood on the other: pregnant girls, nuns, and one man too tall to blend in anyplace. Miss June would have gotten a kick out of it, her funeral making such strange bedfellows.”

At June’s funeral, the whole town gathers to pay its respects but keeps its traditions intact. The townspeople and the residents of Saint Elizabeth’s maintain the strict dichotomy they have become accustomed to over the years.

“She looked at me, maybe just to figure out what I was up to, but she really stopped and looked at me. Sometimes days and weeks can go by without this happening. At that minute I wanted so much to touch her, just her hand or her sleeve.”

While Rose spends so much time watching—and being watched by—her mother, she refuses to do the same with her own daughter. Rose is always busy working or spending time with other people, and she expresses irritation whenever Sissy tries to spend time with her. As a result, Sissy finds herself craving her mother’s attention.

“She had figured out long ago that Saint Elizabeth’s was full of women who were hungry to mother, and I had figured out that nothing short of setting myself on fire in the front lobby would have gotten her attention.”

While Rose takes on certain domestic duties at Saint Elizabeth’s, she refuses to take on the duty of mothering Sissy, leaving that to the women of Saint Elizabeth’s who cannot mother their own children since they have to give their babies up for adoption. Though Sissy likes getting attention from the other women, she is also deeply hurt that her own mother ignores her.

“The way it seemed the fact of her beauty had never occurred to her and so made her more beautiful. None of it, not lip or tooth or ankle or eyelash had come to me. And I wanted it. And I knew she would think I was ridiculous for wanting it. And I knew that if I asked her, and if she could give it to me, she would pull her beauty over head and hand it to me like an old dress. ‘Take this,’ she’d tell me. ‘It never did me any good.’”

Sissy does not inherit her mother’s or grandmother’s beauty, though she craves it, hoping it would be something that would connect her to Rose. However, Sissy reveals that Rose has no interest in how she looks; her beauty is irrelevant to her. This is different from Rose’s attitude to her beauty at the beginning of the novel, when she seemed self-conscious and troubled by it. Sissy’s observation shows that Rose has changed with time.

“There were always so many people around who wanted you. So many mothers. I just guess I didn’t have it in me. I’d done such a bad job being a daughter. I never could get over that. Maybe I’d been wanting my own mother back for so long it never really occurred to me that I was supposed to be one, a mother. But I shouldn’t have given you away, Cecilia. I’m sorry about that.”

When Rose is confronted by Sissy about why she was always distant with her, Rose admits that she was never able to take on a mother role because she couldn’t ever escape her daughter role. Her craving for her own mother’s love kept her from being maternal to Sissy. Additionally, this quote reveals Rose’s ambivalence surrounding motherhood.

“‘Driving is the most important thing you can learn,’ she said. ‘It’s the secret of the universe.’”

Rose loves driving because it gives her agency and freedom. Additionally, it is the one skill she feels she must pass down to her daughter, giving Sissy the practical tools to claim freedom.

“‘Of course they do. You’ve got good parents and a nice house and a whole flock of doting nuns. You’re the queen of the show around that place. You don’t make anyone feel like a freak.’ She leaned toward me and added in her best, dramatic whisper, ‘You’re a virgin.’”

When Sissy gets older, she becomes more aware of her virginity, especially because she is surrounded by so many girls who have had sex and bear the physical consequences of those sexual encounters. As a result, many of those girls find themselves jealous of Sissy’s seemingly uncomplicated life.

“The shoe was under the dresser, no telling how it got there, but sitting there with that shoe in my hand, thinking about how my mother had gone out and bought it just out of logic or thoughtfulness, got me all choked up. That’s how it would come back to me, her leaving. In little ways you never would’ve imagined.”

While Rose was not a dedicated mother to Sissy, she did take on a daughter-like role to Sister Evangeline. She spent time and energy helping Sister Evangeline, caring for her as she got older. When Sissy realizes this in her mother’s absence, she is upset to be reminded of her mother’s kindness, especially since she so rarely experienced it herself.