For years Mamie Künstler has lived happily in her bungalow in Venice, California, with her inscrutable housekeeper and her gigantic St. Bernard dog. Their tranquility is upended when Mamie’s grandson, Julian, arrives from New York City to seek his fortune in Hollywood. But it is 2020, the pandemic sweeps in, and Julian’s short visit suddenly has no end in sight. Mamie was only 11 when the Künstlers escaped Vienna in 1939. They made their way to sunny, surreal Los Angeles where they joined a colony of distinguished Jewish musicians, writers and intellectuals also escaping Hitler. Now, Mamie begins to tell Julian the buried stories of her early years in Los Angeles. While the pandemic cuts Julian off from the life he knows, Mamie’s tales open up a world of lives that came before him.

Laurel and Daphne Wolfe are identical, inseparable redheaded twins who share an obsession with words. As adults making their way in 1980s Manhattan, their verbal infatuation continues, but this love, which has always bound them together, begins instead to push them apart. Daphne, copy editor and grammar columnist, devotes herself to preserving the dignity and elegance of Standard English. Laurel, who gives up teaching kindergarten to write poetry, is drawn to the polymorphous, chameleon nature of the written and spoken word. Their fraying twinship finally shreds completely when the sisters go to war over custody of their most prized family heirloom: Merriam Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition.

Joy Bergman is not slipping into old age with the quiet grace that her children, Molly and Daniel, would prefer. Her marriage to their father, Aaron, has lasted through health and dementia, as well as some phenomenally lousy business decisions. The Bergman clan has always stuck together, growing as it incorporated in-laws, ex-in-laws and same-sex spouses. But families don't just grow, they grow old. Cathleen Schine's novel is an intergenerational story about searching for where you belong as your family changes with age.

Joy Bergman is not slipping into old age with the quiet grace her children, Molly and Daniel, would prefer. She won't take their advice, and she won't take an antidepressant. Her marriage to their father, Aaron, has lasted through health and dementia, as well as some phenomenally lousy business decisions. The Bergman clan has always stuck together, growing as it incorporated in-laws, ex-in-laws and same-sex spouses. But families don't just grow, they grow old. Cathleen Schine's THEY MAY NOT MEAN TO, BUT THEY DO is a tender, sometimes hilarious intergenerational story about searching for where you belong as your family changes with age.

It’s 1964. Eleven-year-old Fin and his glamorous, worldly, older half sister, Lady, have just been orphaned, and Lady, whom Fin hasn’t seen in six years, is now his legal guardian and his only hope. That means Fin is uprooted from a small dairy farm in rural Connecticut, landing in Greenwich Village in the middle of the Swinging Sixties. He soon learns that Lady --- giddy, impulsive, and pursued by an ardent and dogged set of suitors --- is as much his responsibility as he is hers.