At its core, The Patron Saint of Liars is a novel that explores the power and complexities of mother-daughter relationships. These relationships shape the female characters—like Rose, Helen, Sister Evangeline, and Sissy—giving them purpose and an identity.

Rose’s close relationship with her mother, Helen, establishes that mother-daughter relationships can shape characters in subtle and enduring ways. Helen is a very beautiful woman, and Rose inherits her beauty, which shows that one way that mothers can affect their daughters’ lives is by passing down traits to them. Rose and Helen bond over the power their beauty gives them and experience the world through this shared identity as beautiful women. Rose is deeply attached to her mother; after she decides to leave California, she misses Helen the most. To punish herself for leaving Thomas, Rose decides to give up her relationship with Helen as penance since this is “the thing [she] love[s] most in the world” (37). However, even after this, being Helen’s daughter is a firm part of her identity, and she always carries her guilt about abandoning her mother. Many years later, Rose tells her own daughter, Sissy, that she’d “done such a bad job being a daughter.