Deborah Tannen

I have two sisters; one is two years older, and one is eight years older. That helped me understand how completely different sister relationships can be.

I'm a linguist. I study how people talk to each other and how the ways we talk affect our relationships.

Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women.

For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.

For each other, at each other: Sisters can be either or both. The same could be said of people in any close relationship. Yet there is something special about sisters - specially gratifying and specially fraught.

For girls and women, talk is the glue that holds a relationship together - and the explosive that can blow it apart. That's why you can think you're having a perfectly amiable chat, then suddenly find yourself wounded by the shrapnel from an exploded conversation.

The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation - or a relationship.

There are those who believe that the existence of gender differences at very early ages is evidence that these differences are biological or generic in origin.

A sister is like yourself in a different movie, a movie that stars you in a different life.

American popular culture, like individuals in daily life, tends to either romanticize or demonize mothers. We ricochet between 'Everything I ever accomplished I owe to my mother' and 'Every problem I have in my life is my mother's fault.'

Many mothers and daughters are as close as any two people can be, but closeness always carries with it the need - indeed, the desire - to consider how your actions will affect the other person, and this can make you feel that you are no longer in control of your own life.

Each person's life is lived as a series of conversations.