Cathleen Schine

Cathleen Schine is an American novelist known for comedies of family life in which affection and rivalry are often inseparable. The Grammarians follows identical twins Laurel and Daphne, who share a private language as children and become equally devoted to words. Their paths later divide: Daphne becomes a copy editor and usage columnist, while Laurel turns from teaching toward poetry. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published the novel in 2019, and Picador later issued a paperback edition. A family copy of Webster's New International Dictionary gives the sisters both common ground and material for disagreement as their approaches to grammar, authority, and invention sharpen. Schine uses dictionaries, disputed usages, and playful verbal discoveries to trace a relationship that changes without losing its early intimacy. The Grammarians fits her broader interest in families under pressure, but its particular energy comes from treating English itself as a shared inheritance that can unite two people and give them new ways to argue.