"I Only Say This Because I Love You" by Deborah Tannen

The author of "You Just Don't Understand" turns her eagle eye on the stinging, maddening, sneaky ways that family members communicate.

By Maria Russo

Jun 26, 2001 | Deborah Tannen is the professor of linguistics who gave a scientific imprimatur to the "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" idea in the bestselling "You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation." Since then, she's tackled the world of business-speak in "Talking From 9 to 5" and taken a shot at our overly confrontational public conversational style in "The Argument Culture." In her new book, "I Only Say This Because I Love You," Tannen returns to her bread and butter: how people talk to each other in their intimate relationships. This time, she's concerned with how families, especially parents and their adult children, communicate -- or, more often, fail miserably to communicate, leaving battle scars where comforting bonds should be.

How to get along with the family is a problem that has launched countless blueprint-for-life self-help franchises. Like most of Tannen's books, this one is clearly aimed at that market -- it's got a strong whiff of the cheery, studiously inoffensive, bullet-pointed formula about it. But that doesn't mean that the wisdom in it is banal.

Tannen's conclusions are based on carefully gathered empirical evidence and sound linguistic principles -- and lest we forget that she's not some self-appointed expert, she lets us see bits of her transcriptions and analyses of thousands of hours of tape-recorded conversations, showing us her painstaking method at work. And while Tannen will never be celebrated for elevating the self-help genre to something approaching the literary -- check out Peter Kramer's improbably elegant "Should You Leave?" if you don't think that can be done -- she does succeed in passing on some impressive, eminently useful insights into the kinds of wounds, dilemmas and impasses that have kept novelists in business for centuries.

So what if you have to wade through some painfully predictable metaphors (the family is a "pressure cooker in which relationships roil"; "the seeds of family love" sometimes "yield a harvest of criticism and judgment") to get to the point. And so what if the names she invents to protect the identity of her study subjects tend toward the fossilized: Dick, Sally, Betty. Tannen's central idea, and the way the book illustrates it in action, are worth it: When we talk to people close to us, we give and receive not only "messages," the literal meaning of whatever words are spoken, but also "metamessages," which communicate to us something about the relationship between the two speakers. That's where we get into trouble when we talk to family members.

The book's title captures a classic example of these dual levels at work: A mother who precedes a statement to her grown daughter with "I only say this because I love you" is getting ready to say something that the daughter will interpret as intrusive and critical, but that the mother will see as an attempt to help. Tannen quotes one women who says that whenever she hears that phrase from her own mother, "I know she's going to tell me I'm fat."

Next Page: "Do you really need another piece of cake?"

• View blog reactions