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

And keep in mind that "living together means coordinating so many tasks that it's inevitable that family members will have different ideas about how to perform those tasks." If you think your way is better, don't have an argument, make an argument -- string together coherent thoughts that attempt to bring the other person around to your point of view. But realize that the person may simply not care about the same things you do, and you may have to let some things go. In general, the book's many examples suggest that those hostility-tinged rhetorical questions that don't really allow for a dignified answer -- "What are you, crazy?" "So I'm just like a stranger to you, then?" "What did I just say?" -- are always a bad idea and should be purged immediately from your repertoire.

Tannen is also big on apologizing, which, she concedes, is something women care deeply about but men tend to strenuously avoid. Just do it, she says, in a chapter cleverly titled "I'm Sorry, I'm Not Apologizing." She doesn't subscribe to the view that women apologize too much, thereby conveying a lack of self-confidence. She thinks that apologies "work their magic in myriad ways," including getting the person you're apologizing to to admit his own fault.

There are also ways to get the same effect without the ritual humiliation that men seem to think an apology entails. Focusing on the effect of the action rather than on the intention -- "I'm sorry it turned out that way" rather than "I'm sorry for what I did" -- can be one solution. (It did seem to work when the U.S. tried it during the recent spy plane impasse with China: "I'm sorry for the death of the pilot" -- though that seemed a bit weaselly, too). She also suggests explaining rather than excusing your actions: "An excuse is an explanation that implies you didn't do anything wrong; because you had a good reason, it wasn't your fault, or someone else made you do it. But an explanation that does not evade responsibility can be an effective element of a good apology."

Every once in a while Tannen dips her toe into some deeper philosophical waters, as when she concludes the book with Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset's idea of "exuberance" and "deficiency": Everything we say is exuberant in that it conveys even more than we could have consciously planned to put there. Yet it's also deficient in that there's so much we yearn to say to other people that we never can. It's especially true, and especially poignant, when it comes to the people in our families. One seemingly modest but potentially life-changing gift we can give them, then, is to try out Tannen's style of careful, good-humored attention to the ways talking connects us.

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