"I love her to death. I can't imagine life without her," a woman says about her sister. Another remarks, "I don't want anyone to kill my sister because I want to have that privilege myself." With these two comments, begins this eye-opening and entertaining new book.
New York Timesbestselling author Deborah Tannen is renowned for illuminating the way we communicate–and revolutionizing relationships in the process. What she did for women and men in You Just Don't Understand, and mothers and daughters in You're Wearing THAT?, she now does for sisters in a groundbreaking book that explores one of the most powerful and perplexing relationships in our lives.
Conversations between sisters reveal a deep and constant tug between two dynamics–an impulse towards closeness and an impulse towards competition, as sisters are continually compared to each other. When you're with her, you laugh your head off, and can giggle and be silly like when you were kids. But she also might be the one person who can send you into a tailspin with just one wrong word. For many women, a sister is both.
With a witty and wise voice, Tannen shares insights and anecdotes from well over a hundred women she interviewed, along with moving and funny recollections of her own two sisters. You'll come away with a profound new understanding, as well as effective techniques to improve and accessible solutions for problems in this unique and precious relationship.
I have a sister and we love each other but sometimes we fight for stupid things and feel like we don't want to be sisters so I was curious to read what the author has written and I was very impressed because she has given some very quality tips on how to understand your sister and don't compete with her. I am a bit slimmer than her and she has always envied me about but I want everything to be fine and never to envy each other so I gave it to my sister to read it and I am sure she will relate many things with our life and will change her. I truly enjoyed this book and recommend it. I also liked another book Be 2 Hot 2 Handle: Make Every Man Fall in Love with You Instantly
I am an avid reader,yet this book has engrossed me like no other. It has transported me back to my childhood, released memories long repressed, and given voice to fears of the future that have remained unspoken. Deborah Tannen becomes like a sister surrogate as she gently guides you through the labyrinth of layers that engulf the sister relationship within the family: the alignments that are forged with or against parents that make or break the sister bond, the importance of the birth order, the inevitable competition between sisters, such as "the pretty vs the smart one" and the pitfalls of each assigned role, and much, much more.. Ms Tannen's beautiful prose makes the reading of this well researched, relevant and highly therapeutic book a true pleasure. I have read all of her previous work, and this is her best publication so far. I could not stop reading it.
If there is a neurosis to be found in any communication venue (parent/child, employee/coworker, male/female), author and linguist Deborah Tannen can parse it into a relatable and readable synopsis. Tannen says of herself "Conversation is the lens through which I peer". And, indeed, in "You Were Always Mom's Favorite", we see how girls - specifically as sisters - can talk.
Tannen has assembled a multitude of real-life "sister" stories, often including her own; she is the youngest of three girls, yet she clearly takes no side as she describes the foibles and feints of this relationship. Using famous sisters, movies, folklore, poets and their poetry, different cultures, birth order, and even animal studies, she shows how the struggle for the limited and finite resource of parental attention becomes organically bound into a sister's identity.
Sisters' conversations reveal how comparison can become competition, and how bonding becomes bondage as sisters stay connected (or disconnected) throughout their lives. Being sisters, it seems, is much like a marriage with no chance of divorce. The ultimate value of Tannen's book is in translating the meta-messages of the highly intense sister code, thereby strengthening current and future connections despite the inevitable hills and valleys inherent in being sisters.
Most books of this genre inflict new scholarly verbiage on their readers, but instead, Tannen lets the simple content of real conversation speak for itself. In fact, it is only in the final two chapters that she introduces the terms "sisterspeak" and "genderlect". There are no gimmicks here, just real sisters speaking as un-edited sisters, and this is a refreshing relief.
I own and have read three of Tannen's earlier books, and I have to say "You Were Always Mom's Favorite" is not always as captivating, all-accessible, nor as orderely as her book from 1986 "That's Not What I Meant - How Conversational Style Makes of Breaks Relationships". These current chapters tend to blend together: for every case of differences in sisters, there is another set of examples for sameness. This prevalence of extremes and identicalness makes it difficult to read large portions of this book in one sitting, and in fact, there are long stretches of examples where sisterspeak is not even particularly unique nor interesting.
Internal consistency is not always clear, either. On one page Tannen writes of her many interviews with sisters "I never heard a woman say ... of her sister(s) ...'We're exactly the same'", yet just a few pages later she launches into a section "She's Me" wherein sisters are shown at times to be identical and indistinguishable. The current book just does not have the fluidity of her earlier books, where examples are threaded together by cogent comments instead of simply being piled together as for some scientific discourse.
Still, I have long blamed my own older sister for much of my own dysfunction (conversational and otherwise), and Tannen's latest book does indeed support much of my case. The problem is, this book also provides strong grounds for a counterclaim by my sister against me!
