I Only Say This Because I Love You

April 9, 2001
Tannen's You Just Don't Understand
set tongues wagging across the country in the early 1990s with its analysis of gender differences in speaking styles. Now the linguist and author of numerous other books turns her attention to patterns of speech within families. Though the subject is not as sexy as in her mega-bestseller, most readers are apt to hear themselves in these pages. For example, Tannen asserts, in many situations the mother serves as "Communications Chief" as well as chief critic. Drawing on sample conversations from an ongoing study at Georgetown University, from memoirs and from TV documentaries (including An American Family, which examined the Loud family of Santa Barbara in 1973 and reveals how little family interactions have changed in the past 30 years), she convincingly shows how threads of family history and emotion add weight and complexity to everyday exchanges. Each conversation, she argues, carries meaning both in its actual words and in the underlying relationship and attitudes it expresses (e.g., "I didn't criticize you. I just asked a question"). She also shows how speakers may use language for connection and control, influencing shifts in family alignment. Like its predecessor, this book is neither scholarly nor overtly self-help–oriented. Its advice is embedded in its examples, though occasionally Tannen offers explicit guidelines, such as rules for fair fighting: stick to the facts; avoid insults, sarcasm and exaggeration. Parents of teenagers may also find some good insights in Tannen's clear-sighted analysis of how clashing frames of reference undermine communication. Agent, Suzanne Gluck; first serial to Good Housekeeping and Modern Maturity. (May 10)Forecast: Tannen's 13-city author tour (including a May 14 appearance on the
Today Show) will help ensure this book's visibility, but it's more likely to match the respectable (but not stellar) numbers for
Talking 9 to 5, her book on workplace speaking styles, than those for
You Just Don't Understand.

May 15, 2001
The author of 17 books (e.g., That's Not What I Meant!, You Just Don't Understand), Tannen (linguistics, Georgetown) returns to her first love, "the language of everyday conversation" among family members, using transcripts, anecdotes, and literary examples. With lively prose and genuine concern for people, Tannen brings linguistic concepts metamessage, re-framing, indirect request to bear on dozens of situations to help lay readers strengthen family ties. Her audience needs to realize that she blurs lines between linguistic science and art; she is also a poet, translator, and playwright, and she frequently dips into social sciences and philosophy. Discussions of connection and control, apology, and talking with teens draw on psychology more than linguistics, and Tannen's judgments are sometimes partial, in both senses of the word, and open to dispute. This is nevertheless a fine stimulant to conversation, constructive argument, and research. Essential for larger public and academic libraries, along with Suzette Haden Elgin's works (e.g., The Last Word on the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, 1987). E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2001
Linguist and best-selling author Tannen explores how caring and concern, connection and control are communicated between family members. She uses research, conversations with actual family members, personal recollections, and literature and movies to illustrate the complexities of communication within families. Family communication is marked by intimacy and indirection. Who first knew your secrets and your hot buttons? Who else can reduce you to a sniveling adolescent with a single word? Parents and siblings have power based on age and role in the family, and their ways of talking reinforce that power. "Family relations are a web of alliances drawn and redrawn by talk, as information is shared, repeated, kept secret, or revealed." Sibling rivalries, jealousies, resentments, secrets, and gossip are all elements in the constant struggle to balance our need for connectedness with our resistance to being controlled. Tannen examines the nature of family arguments, differences in how men and women apologize, changes in how children talk to their parents, relationships among siblings, and the indirect methods of communication with family members. Family is a source of comfort, consolation, and intimate criticism. Because of a long shared history, everything said evokes the past. Tannen inspects the "metamessages" of family communications, the unstated meanings behind what is said. She demonstrates the layers of meaning, advises readers on metacommunications--that is, talking about ways of talking--and considers how to change how one communicates with family members. A fascinating book for quite a variety of readers. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)