Author explores the language of mothers and daughters

It can start with a throwaway remark -- something as simple as "I usually slice the tomatoes lengthwise."

Or a seemingly harmless question: "Do you like wearing your hair that long?"

Suddenly the air crackles with tension, and a warm exchange between loved ones boils over into mutual accusation.

"Why are you always criticizing me?"

"I just asked a simple question. Why are you so sensitive?"

If this sounds like battling lovers, guess again.

Sixteen years after her take on male-female conversation earned her a long berth on the best-seller list, linguist Deborah Tannen has hit upon another hotbed of miscommunication: the mother-daughter relationship.

How can two people who love each other so deeply unleash such hurt and resentment with a casual remark? How can they speak the same female lingo and still misread each other's intentions? Tannen counts the ways in her new best seller, "You're Wearing THAT? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation" (Random House, 288 pages, $24.95).

Drawing largely from taped conversations between her Georgetown University students and their mothers -- plus her own interviews with a wide range of women -- Tannen teases out the assumptions that make the mother-daughter duo among the closest yet most emotionally fraught of all relationships.

"We talk to each other in better and worse ways than we would to anyone else," Tannen said by phone shortly before heading out on tour.

It's not that fathers and daughters, or mothers and sons, don't face some of the same conversational hurdles. But mothers and daughters tend to suffer more scorch marks because of the closeness and power struggles that often define the relationship.

"Someone said, 'Who else can I tell but my mother that I got a good deal on toilet paper?' " Tannen said. "There's just a level of interest in every detail of your life."

To her undisguised delight, Tannen's new book has touched a nerve in the nation's psyche. Not since 1990, when she made her pop-culture mark examining male-female failure to communicate, has Tannen had such a hit on her hands. Within days of its release, it zoomed into Amazon's top 10.

"Oh, God, I haven't experienced anything remotely like this since 'You Just Don't Understand,' " she said. "My whole life has been upside down. The best part is women telling me it's helpful.

"Hopefully, I'm not going to solve every problem, but it opens up a conversation about it. I tried to show both points of view."

Tannen has no children of her own, so she can only intuit mothers' viewpoint from her four-plus years working on the book. But she knows all too well the push-pull of a grown daughter trying to negotiate the boundary between "close" and "too close," between unqualified love and unmitigated irritation.

In one telling anecdote, she hearkens back to an incident during the early success of "You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation."

Thrilled by the book's big splash -- it spent three years on The New York Times list, including eight months at No. 1 -- Tannen set out on a national tour that slotted her into various local talk shows. Hoping to share her triumph with her parents, she asked friends in those cities to videotape her appearances.

"My mother was very excited to see her daughter on television," Tannen recounts in the book, "but she was also upset because I wore the same suit on all the shows. She was not mollified by my explanation that no one else watched all the shows."

"If my mother was upset by my inattention to my clothes, I was upset that instead of paying attention to what I said, she was looking at what I wore."

As Tannen was to discover, clothes, hair and weight are the "Big Three," the conversational tar pits that entrap so many mothers and daughters.

That's partly because mothers and daughters often see each other as representing them to the outside world, she said, and they worry they'll be judged by one another's appearance.

Fretting over a daughter's funky hairstyle or jarring clothing also can be mom's protective instinct at work -- alerting a daughter to what everyone else is thinking but doesn't dare say.

And what's wrong with that?

The problem is that daughters -- even capable adult professionals such as Tannen -- crave their mothers' approval so much that any hint of disapproval gets blown out of proportion.

In turn, a daughter's defensive withdrawal can be deeply hurtful to her mother.

"I was quite struck," Tannen said, "by how often the mothers of daughters felt excluded."

Ironically, grown daughters often think of mom as all-powerful long after the balance has shifted. A daughter's ability to shut mom out -- or cut off access to the grandkids (even if she would never actually do it) -- gives daughters a lot of clout.

In fact, Tannen said, some moms nag their grown daughters precisely because they feel so powerless over their daughters' lives. "One of the really a-ha moments," she said, "was when I realized they both overestimate each other's power and underestimate their own."

There's a deeply personal strain to all of this. Not only did Tannen unsparingly probe her own reservoir of hurts and misunderstandings -- as well as joys -- as she wrote the book, she did so against the backdrop of her mother's decline. Her mother died at age 93 in July 1994, while Tannen was hip-deep in her manuscript.

"I did most of the writing right after she had passed away," Tannen said, "so a lot of my emotions were close to the surface."

Tannen, now 60, said she experienced a surprising surge of emotion during her mother's final months. Here she stood, a hearty 5-foot-9 professional, caring for the woman who still loomed so large in her mind -- a tiny woman whose high-water mark of 5-foot-2 was receding fast as disease and age took their toll.

"It's quite amazing how the physical experience of taking care of someone fills you with love," Tannen said. "Mothers know that from taking care of children, but I never had that. It just fills me with tenderness that she was so fragile.

"Of course, when I was a teenager and she seemed needy, I couldn't stand it."

In the book's most poignant passage, Tannen describes a tender scene in which her ailing mom illustrates the tenacity of maternal devotion and protectiveness.

"One afternoon, during a visit," Tannen recounts, "I lay down on the couch to take a brief nap. Before succumbing to the plunge into sleep, I felt a movement at my legs. Briefly opening my eyes, I saw my mother, one hand on her cane, the other carrying a small blanket she had brought from the foot of the bed. Still gripping her cane, she used the other hand to spread the blanket over my legs.

"I can't tell this story without tearing up. It is one of my most precious memories from the last years of my mother's life."

In the end, Tannen suggests, empathy wins the day. Women who see themselves in her book say they see the other side as well -- the caring behind the criticism, the hope behind the hurts.

"Mothers feel vindicated and daughters do, too."

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