“The Patron Saint of Liars” by Ann Patchett: Protagonist’s two names, her inconsistent driving skills, and declaration she is a liar

In the first fifty pages of Patchett’s first novel, the first-person narrator and protagonist is introduced as a young woman with two names, who loves to drive a car, and declares she is a liar.

Two Names

Her first and middle names are “Martha Rose,” but she is always called “Rose.” She explains: “It was my father who wanted to name me Rose…My mother settled on Martha…So I was Martha Rose, Martha until my father died and Rose after that” (1, p. 38). Her father died from injuries in a car accident when she was three years old.

Why does Patchett make an issue of the character’s two names? Do they represent two personalities?

Driving Skill

Rose loved to drive, had to drive, because “I had found a tightness in my chest. Some nights it woke me up, and I would lie there, taking shallow breaths…The only time it seemed to go away was when I was driving” (1, p. 31).

When she found out she was pregnant, but didn’t want to have a child or remain married, she decided not to tell her husband or her mother of her pregnancy or where she was going, but simply planned to drive far away, out of state, to a home for unwed mothers.

The peculiar inconsistence of her driving skills is notable: “After I left the doctor’s office, after he had shaken my hand and said congratulations, I drove the car out onto the freeway and couldn’t remember how to drive. I pulled over into the breakdown lane and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel…I kept thinking, someone is going to open the passenger side door and tell me what to do…but no one came” (1, pp. 33-34).

In multiple personality, alternate personalities may differ in their skills. One personality may know how to drive, but another personality may not. Did the author know this about multiple personality? Or had she experienced puzzling changes in her own skills?

Liar

This is the protagonist’s first line in the novel: “I was somewhere outside of Ludlow, California, headed due east toward Kentucky, when I realized that I would be a liar for the rest of my life” (1, p. 13). And the title of the novel is The Patron Saint of Liars. I don’t yet know Patchett’s reason for highlighting the issue of lying.

My interest in lying is its relation to multiple personality. Persons with multiple personality may be thought of as liars when their alternate personalities contradict each other, or make up fanciful stories, or when one personality denies doing something that another personality has been seen doing. Search “lying” for past discussions of this recurring topic.

1. Ann Patchett. The Patron Saint of Liars [1992]. New York, Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.