A man and his wife visit their daughter and her newborn at a cottage in a tropical forrest. Though the daughter never told them she was pregnant, the parents vow to take care of their grandchild when illness strikes their family.

Following her father's death, a woman moves into a cheap apartment complex and attends AA meetings while her mother channels her grief into constructing an elaborate enclosure for a desert tortoise she wishes to adopt.

A twelve-year-old living in Texas is diagnosed with tuberculosis and goes to a tanning salon.

A teenage girl and her mother grapple with the mother’s impending death. Throughout her mother’s last days, both try to cope with the idea of losing each other as the daughter gives in to her mother’s spontaneous requests in an attempt to please her.

After a man is executed by the state of Florida for murdering a police officer, his teenage son moves to an island with his grandmother. There, his grandmother looks through hundreds of photographs and postcards from her son's travels; she is particularly entranced by his postcards from Morocco and begins lying about them as a kind of game.

Two narcissistic adult daughters take exception to their wealthy parents' houseguests, a priest mourning his dead lover, and the strange and frumpy American woman Arleen. But Arleen possesses insight into the family that the girls' own parents lack.

Gloria, a young woman with a fatal cancer, visits her eccentric friend and her equally strange daughter, but her plans are thrown off course when the daughter asks Gloria to kidnap her.

A Californian couple takes their teenage daughter on boarding school tours in New England, hoping to provide her some freedom after their older daughter passed away a year ago.