I. The Catalogue of Crimes
It is worth pausing, before any interpretive claim, simply to inventory what these women do, because the sheer accumulation of offenses across the corpus is itself an argument. In “Arise and Go Now,” Catherine Mulroy tells her wealthy friend Rita that her grandson Aiden has leukemia in order to solicit a check for “medical expenses” that do not exist: “Nanna had taken me to Rita’s a few weeks earlier. She told her that I had leukemia and asked for help with the medical bills,” Aiden reports, with the flat affect of a child long accustomed to his grandmother’s methods. When Aiden confronts Rita about the deception directly — “If you knew my grandmother was lying, why did you write the check?” — Rita’s answer supplies the moral architecture the whole cycle will keep returning to: “Your grandmother is a lifelong friend. She needed money. I recognized her anxiety and wanted to help. . . . Of course not. Catherine lies. . . . But we all do. To others and to ourselves.” The lie is confirmed, not concealed; the victim is not deceived so much as complicit, participating in a fiction she sees through because seeing through it and paying anyway is, in this social world, itself an act of love.
In “Blindfolded,” the fraud escalates from words to theft. Catherine and Aiden orchestrate an elaborate scheme at a Boston healing service — faking a fall at the altar rail to create a diversion — so that Catherine can steal a gold chalice believed to have curative properties, intending to have her institutionalized daughter drink wine from it. “I need to get that chalice, Aiden,” she says, already rehearsing the justification before the crime is committed. “I don’t know if I believe it, but I hope so. . . . I’m going to return it, sweetheart. We’re just borrowing the chalice to make your mother well again. I think God will understand.” The theft is executed with the tactical precision of a heist: the fake collapse (“Fall,” she whispers, “Remember our plan”), the staged hysteria at the altar (“Dear Jesus, I don’t know how many more tribulations I can take”), the smooth extraction of the object during the resulting commotion. Two weeks later, in a scene of pure theatrical audacity, grandmother and grandson return the chalice to a different church altogether, inventing on the spot a story about a homeless man who stole it and was persuaded to give it back — earning applause from the very congregation they are actively deceiving, and a title, self-bestowed in the moment of departure, that could serve as an epigraph for the whole cycle: “I’m Elaine, and this is my grandson Galahad.”
“Keep Calm and Carry On” makes the criminality domestic and casual rather than theatrical. Catherine sends young Aiden into a friend’s house on the pretext of using the bathroom; he returns with diamond earrings, an opal bracelet, two rings, and a gold necklace lifted from a dresser drawer, while Margie — fat, lonely, unsuspecting, and moments earlier described discussing the miracles of Christ with real religious feeling — chats obliviously in the next room. The text does not flinch from the ugliness of exploiting a friend’s faith and loneliness in the same conversation in which that friend is expressing genuine spiritual anxiety (“I don’t know how I feel about all those miracles Father Tom was going on about”). Nor does it flinch from what happens next: a car chase-adjacent scene in which Catherine, distracted by admiring the stolen necklace, runs a red light in front of a police officer, and talks her way out of a citation by weeping — “I know, officer. I was saying a prayer with my grandson. He gave me this gold cross and I got distracted. I’m very sorry” — tears that the text explicitly marks as theater (“Are you sad, Nanna?” “Don’t be silly. . . . That was an act.”) only for the same page to reveal, moments later, that the next set of tears, over her dead husband and institutionalized daughter, are unmistakably, devastatingly real: “This time my grandmother’s tears were real. They gushed like water from that rock in the Middle East.”
Molly Bonamici transposes the same architecture into an Italian-American register and raises the stakes to include the possibility — never fully adjudicated by the novel — that Nonna’s manipulations extend to coaching a minor through deception of law enforcement, staging illness for financial gain, and orchestrating years of small domestic frauds so continuous that the novel’s teenage narrator, unlike Aiden, has stopped being shocked by any of it. Where Aiden retains, across four stories, a residual innocence that lets the reader feel the moral vertigo of each scheme freshly, Molly’s flatter, more clinical narration — the choice, this essay will argue in its final section, is the novel’s central formal decision — has already absorbed the criminality into ordinary weather.
II. Why the Con and Not Simply the Lie
It would be possible to read all of this as a study in ordinary lying — the small deceptions that, as Rita says, “we all” commit, “to others and to ourselves.” But Mulhern’s grandmothers do not merely lie; they run cons, in the precise technical sense the term carries in American literary history: engineered performances that require a mark, a story calibrated to that mark’s specific sympathies, a moment of staged crisis, and an exit executed before scrutiny can catch up with narrative. Catherine’s leukemia story is calibrated to Rita’s specific vulnerability — a woman haunted by her own childless marriage and by grief for a dead husband, primed to respond to a sick child. The chalice theft is a two-act structure with a planted diversion. The jewelry theft depends on Margie’s specific blind spots — her loneliness, her trust, her physical difficulty moving quickly enough to catch anyone in the act. Each scheme is bespoke. Each mark is chosen and studied. This is craft, not carelessness, and the fiction insists on showing us the craft: the whispered stage directions (“Remember our plan”), the after-action debriefing (“Perfect. She isn’t looking, is she?”), the seamless improvisation when a scheme threatens to unravel (inventing “Elaine” and “Galahad” on the spot, inventing the story of the penitent homeless man without a beat of hesitation).
This is where Mulhern’s grandmothers depart most sharply from their nearest American literary relative, the confidence men of Melville and Twain, and align instead with an older and specifically feminine tradition of the trickster-healer, closer to what folklorists and scholars of the American picaresque have called the “confidence woman” tradition — descending, however loosely, from figures like Defoe’s Moll Flanders, whose narrator likewise commits an escalating catalogue of frauds while insisting, and half-believing, in her own fundamental decency. Molly Bonamici’s own name is not incidental to this lineage; a narrator named for the most famous confidence woman in the English novel, living under the roof of a grandmother who is herself a virtuoso of confidence, invites the reader to read the entire family as a multi-generational apprenticeship in the same craft, transmitted the way other families transmit a trade.
But where Moll Flanders operates alone, for herself, in a world that has already failed her, Mulhern’s grandmothers operate as the last functioning institution in households where every sanctioned institution — the psychiatric hospital, the Catholic Church, the marriage, the nuclear family itself — has already failed the children in their care. This is the essay’s central interpretive claim: the con, in Mulhern’s fiction, is not deployed against the family’s interests but is the family’s chief technology of survival, in a social world where the legitimate channels have proven catastrophically unreliable. Aiden’s mother has been institutionalized for hearing voices that the narrative repeatedly, quietly validates. His father has abandoned the family for Arizona and a new woman, dismissing his son’s grief with “someday you’ll understand” and “fuck it.” The Church offers “mumbo-jumbo” healing rituals performed by a priest who “smelled alcohol on his breath.” Against this backdrop of failed legitimate authority, Catherine’s frauds are not a moral collapse; they are a rational, if illegal, adaptation — theft and deception deployed in the service of getting a sick daughter home, getting a grandson medical attention his family cannot otherwise afford, generating cash flow in a household where, as Catherine herself confesses in a rare unguarded moment, “I’m broke. Your grandfather left me with nothing and I gotta pay for your mother’s medical expenses.”
III. The Refusal of Resolution
What makes Mulhern’s treatment of this figure distinctive — and what separates it from either a satire of religious hypocrisy or a straightforward redemption narrative — is its scrupulous refusal to let the reader settle the moral account. Consider the single most theoretically loaded line in the entire cycle, Catherine’s own gloss on her theology of theft: “I think God will understand.” The sentence is doing at least three incompatible kinds of work simultaneously, and the prose lets all three stand without adjudicating among them. It is sincere belief: Catherine is a devout, if idiosyncratically devout, Catholic woman who has spent a lifetime praying to Saint Anthony and crossing herself before crimes; there is no textual signal that she is being ironic. It is rationalization: the sentence licenses an act she knows, on some level, to be wrong, by outsourcing judgment to a deity she trusts to grade on a curve for desperate mothers. And it is, simultaneously, a kind of confession disguised as reassurance — a woman talking herself into a crime by talking a child into believing it is not one.
The narration — filtered, in the Aiden stories, entirely through the boy’s own retrospective first-person voice — refuses to intervene and adjudicate among these readings. This is a formal choice with real interpretive consequences. Aiden as narrator reports Catherine’s actions and words with almost total affective neutrality; the judgments the reader is tempted to make are the reader’s own, manufactured out of the gap between the narrator’s untroubled tone and the plain criminality of what he is describing. When Aiden writes, of the second, more elaborate chalice-theft caper, “We ran out the door and across the street” — the diction of a boy recounting a game, not a felony — the effect is not to normalize the crime but to force the reader to supply, unassisted, the ethical commentary the text is pointedly withholding. Mulhern’s style here recalls, though it does not imitate, Nabokov’s use of an unreliable narrator’s flattened diction to implicate the reader in supplying moral weight the prose declines to supply directly — a technique this author has also deployed, in a considerably darker register, in the psychopathic first-person voices of the short stories “Peppermint Candy” and “Mia Bambina.” That the same narrative strategy — plain, procedural, affectively neutral first-person reporting of transgressive acts — recurs across such different moral registers, from a grandmother’s mercy-motivated theft to a sociopath’s premeditated cruelty, suggests that withheld authorial judgment is not incidental to Mulhern’s style but one of its load-bearing technical commitments.
The tears provide the clearest evidence that the withholding is deliberate rather than accidental. Twice in these stories, Catherine cries: once, demonstrably, as a tactic (“That was an act”); once, immediately after, in a moment the text takes considerable care to mark as unperformed and uncontrollable (“This time my grandmother’s tears were real. They gushed like water from that rock in the Middle East”). The juxtaposition is surgical. A writer interested in exposing Catherine as a fraud straight through would not grant her a real breakdown one paragraph after exposing her performance of one; a writer interested in simple redemption would not have shown the performance first, priming the reader to distrust the tears that follow. Mulhern wants both readings alive in the same scene: this woman manufactures grief when it serves her purposes, and this woman is also crushed by grief she cannot manufacture or control, and there is no stable vantage from which the reader can be certain, at any given moment, which woman is speaking. That instability is not a flaw in the characterization. It is the characterization.
IV. Class, Immigration, and the Ethics of Scarcity
It would be a mistake to read the con-artist grandmother purely as an individual moral puzzle, detached from the specific socioeconomic and historical conditions the fiction takes considerable care to establish. Catherine and her late husband are repeatedly identified as Irish immigrants who arrived in Boston in the late 1930s into a hostile labor market — “When they first arrived, it was difficult to get good jobs. People hated the Irish. He dug graves during the day and hauled large bags of mail onto the trains at South Station during the night. She was a maid for the rich protestant Brahmans on Beacon Hill” — a history of exclusion from “legitimate” channels of advancement that the text positions as the deep root system beneath the adult Catherine’s fluency in illegitimate ones. A woman raised in a world where formal institutions — the labor market, the university, eventually even the Church’s stated theology of thou-shalt-not-steal — have already demonstrated their willingness to exclude and fail people like her is a woman for whom the con is not a moral aberration but an inherited survival competence, honed across a lifetime, deployed now on behalf of a daughter the same institutions (the psychiatric establishment this time, rather than the labor market) have failed all over again.
This socioeconomic reading gains further support from the sheer ordinariness, within the story-world, of Catherine’s fraud. No character who learns of her schemes — not Rita, not the priest, not even, eventually, the reader — treats them as extraordinary moral events requiring extraordinary condemnation. Rita’s response (“But we all do. To others and to ourselves”) universalizes rather than isolates the behavior; Margie’s later, unwitting theft-victim status is narrated with more comic deflation (“Don’t worry, Nanna. I believe in miracles, too”) than moral horror. The community that surrounds Catherine appears to operate by an unspoken, collectively maintained ethical code in which small frauds committed by women without other resources, on behalf of children and the sick, occupy a different moral category than frauds committed for pure self-enrichment — a distinction the text encodes explicitly in Catherine’s own vocabulary of “venial” versus “mortal” sin: “Stealing it was only a venial sin, not a mortal one.” The theology here is folk theology, transmitted orally and adapted pragmatically rather than doctrinally correct, but it does real interpretive work: it names, without fully justifying, a distinction the fiction itself seems to honor between theft-as-predation and theft-as-desperate-mercy.
V. Nonna and the Escalation of Ambiguity
Molly Bonamici pushes this figure further than any of the Aiden stories dare to, largely because its narrator withholds the retrospective warmth that softens Aiden’s account of his grandmother’s crimes. Where Aiden narrates Catherine’s schemes as a participant already enlisted in her worldview — a boy who calls himself “Galahad” without apparent irony — Molly narrates Nonna’s manipulations with the clipped, almost clinical detachment of a much older, more guarded consciousness, even in scenes depicting her own childhood. The introduction to the Silver Current Press edition of the novel is explicit about the stakes of this narrative choice: “The novel never resolves whether Nonna is a con artist or a matriarch holding her family together by whatever means necessary; it simply lets both be true, the way families often require both to be true.” What that same front matter calls “the same faith-healer con that structures a pivotal chapter” recurring “almost move for move” in the author’s short fiction is not, this essay argues, evidence of authorial repetition for its own sake, but evidence that Mulhern regards the confidence-woman grandmother as something closer to an archetype he is still, book after book, trying to see from a new angle — testing what happens to the reader’s sympathy when the narrating consciousness is a traumatized fourteen-year-old boy who loves his grandmother uncomplicatedly, versus what happens when the narrating consciousness is an older, warier girl who has already begun, if only privately, to keep score.
That Molly’s own name gestures toward Defoe’s Moll Flanders, and that the novel’s narrator has, by its final pages, built “a self-built life” far from the family that trained her in its methods, suggests one further dimension worth noting without overclaiming it: Mulhern’s fiction seems increasingly interested not merely in depicting the confidence-woman matriarch but in tracing what becomes of the children she raises — whether the moral flexibility she models becomes, for them, protective inheritance or a debt they spend adulthood trying to discharge. Aiden’s stories end before we can know; Molly’s novel, ending in a solitary ocean swim on the feast day of her namesake saint, offers something closer to an answer, though characteristically for this author, not a wholly legible one.
VI. Conclusion: The Ethics of the Unresolved
What emerges from this survey is a body of fiction unusually committed to holding two judgments of the same women in permanent, unresolved tension: thief and savior, liar and the only reliable adult in the room, fraud and the last functioning institution in a household abandoned by every legitimate one. Mulhern’s grandmothers are neither punished by their narratives nor exonerated by them. Catherine is never caught; the chalice caper succeeds; the jewelry theft goes undiscovered; the leukemia lie secures the check it was designed to secure. Nor does the fiction offer the reader the alternative comfort of straightforward moral condemnation, since every one of these women is also, demonstrably, within the same pages, the reason a grieving boy has breakfast made for him, the reason an institutionalized mother is fought for and eventually brought home, the reason a household without functioning men in it continues, against considerable odds, to function.
This refusal to resolve is not a failure of moral nerve. It is, this essay contends, Mulhern’s most sophisticated and least remarked-upon achievement as a writer of family fiction: an insistence that love and fraud, in conditions of sufficient scarcity and sufficient institutional failure, are not opposites requiring adjudication but neighbors sharing a fence — to borrow language this author’s own front matter, in a different context, uses of his fiction generally — and that any reader who insists on separating them cleanly has understood neither the women nor the world that produced them.