Everyone talks, no one listens

Deborah Tannen, best-selling priestess of the untelling phrase (You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation and That's Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships) tells a story in her new book about standing in a check-in queue at an airport behind a grandmother whose family are seeing her off at the end of a visit. Like Tannen, the grandmother is getting jumpy: the queue is slow and the hour of departure near. Tannen is just thinking of alerting an official to the problem when granny tries to make a run for it with the same thought in mind. "Get back in line!" shouts her son. "She wants to make her life more exciting," chuckles granddaughter, grabbing granny's handbag and rifling through it in search of her boarding card.

This, apparently, was a " control realignment" glimpsed in its natural habitat. Granny did not resist being realigned ... very soon, Tannen reasoned, she would be cruising alone at 30,000 feet, her relatives and their irksome metamessages far below. But not all of us can be beamed up from the bosom, or is it the stomach, of our family, wish for it as we may. Deborah Tannen, whose career has been devoted to understanding the ways in which human beings talk to each other, is here driven to frequent expressions of stark gratitude for the existence of e-mail. It seems that when it comes to families, the only good conversation is a dead conversation.

The experience of reading I Only Say This Because I Love You is like visiting a bomb site or a battlefield after the event - everything seems to exist in a state of perennial aftermath, so that although Tannen has studied families of all types and sizes and stages, in the end they merge together to form a sort of huge human hangover from the instances of love and birth that spawned them. As an object of study, family conversation comes across with startling clarity as something held in a thrall of reference to a central atrocity, the disaster of our attempts to bind ourselves together when we are in essence solitary. Tannen has recorded some of these conversations: the transcripts, which resemble excerpts from an unending meeting of European Union bureaucrats undertaken without the assistance of interpreters, make clear that the majority of family conversations are not conversations at all. Rather, they are a series of monologues spoken as if in a badly mastered second language, whereby the speaker will attempt, often using only the verbal tools of volume and repetition, to make known the state of his or her heart.

Take Kevin and Molly, whose long, hostile discourse on the subject of popcorn is reproduced for us in full. Molly is making popcorn. Kevin, who is looking after their four-yearold-child, suggests that he take over making popcorn while she looks after the child. Molly says that every time he makes popcorn he burns it. By repeating often and loudly that he doesn't burn it, Kevin gains and secures the kitchen. Presently Molly observes that he has burnt the popcorn. Kevin replies that this is because Molly chose the wrong pot to make it in. This is no way, obviously, to spend your time - but what is striking about this and every other example of family conversation here is how the participants manage to make no reference to the truth, which to the onlooker is parked like a big pink Cadillac in the middle of the room. The temptation to get in it and drive away is overwhelming.

This is especially true, perhaps, for children, who as Tannen sadly concludes are generally the conversational serfs in the feudal family village. Around the tape-recorded dinner table, children receive the greatest number of critical comments while giving out the fewest criticisms of others. Fathers criticise others the most and are the least criticised themselves. Mothers both criticise and are criticised. Though thrilling, this information may be too late for a cure. Since reading this book I have found myself wanting to speak differently, in epithets that Tannen could use as titles for other books. For example, I Could Have Told You That.