Bookplanet: Interview with Deborah Tannen

Interview with author who applies tools of linguistics to mend mother-daughter divide
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

Before Deborah Tannen made her mark in her field in the 1980's, academic linguists primarily studied the sound, syntax and history of language. Dr. Tannen saw a bigger picture.

In the 1980's, she encouraged linguists to focus on everyday conversations — the way elements like interruption, intonation, indirectness and storytelling work together and the effects they have on people's relationships.

Her early work in broadening the scope of linguistics came in the thesis for her doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. Titled "Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends," the thesis (and later a book) was an extended analysis of taped discussion at a 1978 Thanksgiving dinner lasting 2 hours 40 minutes.

By the early 1990's, Dr. Tannen was taking her ideas to a wider audience. Her overwhelmingly successful book "You Just Don't Understand" focused on communication (or lack of it) between men and women. It was on best-seller lists from 1990 through 1994.

Now, Dr. Tannen, a professor at Georgetown University, is back on the list with her just-released "You're Wearing That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation."

It appeared at No. 9 on the New York Times best-seller list on Sunday, within days of its publication.

The book is dedicated to her mother, Dorothy, who died in 2004, with whom Dr. Tannen had an admittedly stormy relationship.

"Writing it helped me see things more from her perspective," Dr. Tannen, 60, said in an interview this month in New York.

Q. Many of the women you've interviewed for your new book complain of mothers who criticize their appearance. Are they right to be annoyed?

A. "Right" and "wrong" aren't words a linguist uses. My job is to analyze conversations and discover why communications fail. The biggest complaint I hear from daughters is: "My mother's always criticizing me." And the mother counters, "I can't open my mouth; my daughter takes everything as criticism."

But sometimes caring and criticism are found in the same words. When mothers talk about their daughters' appearance, they are often doing it because they feel obligated to tell their daughter something that no one else will.

The mother feels she's caring. The daughter feels criticized. They are both right.

What I try to do is point out each side to each other. So, the mother needs to acknowledge the criticism part, and the daughter needs to acknowledge the caring part. It's tough because each sees only one.

Q. Is there a unifying theme to your 20 academic and popular books?

A. There's certainly a thread. My writing is about connecting ways of talking to human relationships. My purpose is to show that linguistics has something to offer in understanding and improving relationships.

There are many situations where problems arise between people because conversational styles vary with ethnic, regional, age, class and gender differences.

What can seem offensive to one group isn't to another. I've long believed that if you understand how conversational styles work, you can make adjustments in conversations to get what you want in your relationships.

Q. Can you give an example of communication problems based on what you've seen of mother-daughter conversations?

A. During an interview, a journalist told me she had called her grown daughter the night before and began, "I miss you." Her daughter replied: "Why do you miss me? I just talked to you last week!" The daughter felt criticized for not calling more often.

After our interview, the mother tried something she had never done before. She sent her daughter an e-mail in which she praised and reassured her.

The next day her daughter phoned to continue the conversation. So you see, by understanding how language works within relationships, you can change patterns you're not happy with.

Q. Why are mother-daughter conversations laden with so many pitfalls?

A. It's what one mother I interviewed said: "My conversations with my daughter are the best and the worst."

In the mother-daughter relationship, there's a lot of talk. For women, conversation is the glue that holds relationships together. Mothers and daughters talk to each other far more than mothers and sons, or fathers and daughters. And their talk is different.

There's a great deal about personal matters, the small details of the day and problems in their lives. There's a daughter I interviewed who said, "Who else but my mother cares about every little thing in my life?" Another told me, "I call my mother every day and tell her what I ate for lunch."

One of the great strengths of the mother-daughter relationship is this intimacy. But daughters want their mothers' approval so much that even the slightest hint a mother thinks she should have acted differently about something can set a daughter off.

So when mothers and daughters spend a lot time talking about personal matters, it gives them countless opportunities to say the wrong things to each other.

Q. What kind of communication did you have with your mother?

A. Well, she died at 93. We had a lot of time for our relationship to evolve. When I was young, it was open warfare. We were very different. She was born in Russia, never graduated high school. I was intellectual, even as an adolescent, and so our communications frequently led to frustration. She'd get so angry at me.

The basic thing my mother always wanted is that I should be married. But I married my first husband at 23. We divorced when I was 29. After that, she was always trying to get me to go to Club Med to find a husband. She saw such advice as helpful; I felt hounded.

When I was 40, I met my second husband and my relationship with my mother quickly improved. The older she got, the more I realized how much mothers and daughters are like lovers. In my mother's old age, I brought her gifts and wrote her little notes telling her how much I loved her. And she just basked in that.

I kept it up because it was easy to do and because it was such a pleasure to get this positive reaction after all our conflicts.

Q. Your immigrant mother grew up in a different universe. Are some mother-daughter conflicts rooted in the fact that modern women often live different lives from their mothers?

A. The rapid pace of change in women's lives definitely ratchets up differences. But interestingly, a lot of baby boomer women I interviewed said they had better relations with their daughters than with their mothers.

Their daughters were likely to describe them as their best friends.

To see this relationship as both mother-daughter and a friendship is new — and perhaps particularly American.

There's a study of 12-year-old Austrian and American girls. None of the Austrians described their mothers as "friends," while all of the Americans did.

Q. How did you become a linguist?

A. I'd always loved words and talk. After my first marriage ended, I wanted to reclaim my intellectual life. I'd been teaching remedial writing at Lehman College in New York. With my newfound freedom, I registered for a summer institute in linguistics and fell in love with the discipline.

That summer, I'd found a calling. Linguistics combined my lifelong fascination with talk and my interest in people. Thirty-two years later, I can't imagine any other life.