You Were Always Mom's Favorite!: Sisters in Conversation Throughout Their Lives

I don't have any sisters, but my wife has two. here is her review of the book.
This is a must read for anyone that has a sister. I have two older sisters and it was not until I became an adult that I felt close to them. After reading Tannen's book, I began to understand why we were never close then and why we were able to eventually become friends. The book also gave me insight into the rather stormy relationship my mother had with her sister. The book is well researched,and the women Tannen interviewed for her book tell very candid stories about their relationships with their sisters. Tannen covers a wide variety of sister dynamics-youngest to oldest, the middle child, the parent pleaser,the perfect sister, etc. Every woman with a sister should find examples that she can identify with. I plan on giving both of my sisters copies of the book.

While I dutifully perused this book, hoping to gain some additional insight into my relationship with my sister, I quickly came to the conclusion that there was nothing tremendously new here (at least for me personally). It lost my interest after the third or forth chapter when it became apparent to me that, at most, my feelings would be merely validated on sister-to-sister and birth order types of relationships.
Perhaps this is because I am a women nearing the ripe old age of 60. I have had ample time on this earth to observe and to study. Even after running some of the ideas in this book by my younger sister, she found nothing surprising (she is four years my junior).
In short, I would recommend this book to much younger women, especially those who are experiencing relationship problems with their sisters and would like to gain some insight.

I haven't peeked at what others have said about this book, but I think it's nearly impossible to review it without telling personal stories. I, for instance, am the youngest of four children, with my siblings 10, 12, and 14 years older than me. I grew up with a generation gap between my sisters and myself, and I'm closer in age to my oldest nephew than I am to his father. I found myself in plenty of awkward situations, particularly after all my siblings married (when I was 10); suddenly I was an Only Child.

All those family interrelationships made this book a particular standout among my Amazon Vine choices. Deborah Tannen is famous for exploring so many other relationships, especially regarding gender. Could she spread some enlightenment here, I wondered?

She could.

Tannen interviewed hundreds of women with sisters. And by telling stories, LOTS of stories, she identifies the ways in which our "sisterness" affects us, for good or for ill. Some of the conclusions start out seeming obvious, such as the Oldest Sister so often being called upon to protect and take care of the younger children... except Tannen follows the role into adulthood, and shares how that experience shaped both the oldest sister and the younger ones too. She highlights how the relationships between brothers is like AND unlike sisters' relationships; for instance, men are more likely to say that they and their brothers are "just like" each other, while women generally define themselves by their perceived differences ("I'm the smart one and she's the pretty one" or "I'm tall and she's short") -- and then she passes along stories from her interviews about how those perceptions create opportunities and traps. For example, one woman later regretted that she didn't go to medical school -- because it was her SISTER that was "the smart one" and she had no expectation that she could be good enough.

Tannen's writing is engaging, and I zoomed through the book in a few days' leisure reading. One light note is that she also includes references to sister relationships from literature, from The Taming of the Shrew to The Other Boleyn Girl. Several of those references are interesting enough that I'll soon be adding them to my own reading list.

I think I was expecting this to be some kind of "how to" (like "what younger sisters need to understand about their older sisters") but that isn't quite what You Were Always Mom's Favorite is about. Rather, it made me a lot more aware of the relationships my sisters each had with one another -- especially the ones of which I wasn't a part -- and with our parents. My sisters shared a room for several years (as the baby, I got my own room, and my brother was made Lord of the Finished Attic) but I have only a few memories of their competition for "whose side of the room this is" or the dreaded hand-me-down clothing or their shared doll collection or the (imagined, for me) clamoring for parental attention before I, the brat, turned up on the scene.

I very much enjoyed the book, but I can't quite tell you what appeals to me most about it. (I'm not used to that!) I don't want to say, "This is a great gift for any woman with a sister," because I'm not sure that it is. I think that if you and your sister love each other a lot, and are very close, you'll both enjoy reading it, because it's sure to start many fruitful conversations. If your relationship is less perfect... hmm, you should read the book yourself, rather than immediately gift it to her; I can imagine too many ways that a sister in a troublesome relationship might consider the book some kind of criticism, when all you meant was enlightenment.

Anyone who has a love/hate relationship with a sister, will love this book! It is full of insights and topics that are witty, tearfull and makes you want to grab your own sister and give her a hug!

Why aren't relationships between women easy? What happens between the time we play with our Barbies and giggle about boys to the time we chat over coffee and gripe about our husbands? As girls, we willingly share our secrets and our toys. Then, some miraculous transformation occurs and we become bitchy. We nit-pick, gossip, compare and compete. We tear each other down when we should be building each other up. We put ourselves on a track when there is no race.

What I love about Deborah Tannen's books is that she helps to explain the complex, painful, beautiful, messy relationships that occur between women. She helps us to understand our familial roles and how they affect our other relationships.

You're Wearing That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation was the first Tannen book I ever read and I found it enlightening and useful. It helped me to understand why my relationship with my mother was so fraught with tension and pain. It also helped me to be aware of the way I phrase things when speaking with my daughter.

I do not have a sister, but I do have three female cousins that bicker constantly. I have grown up with a front-row seat to their bickering and it oftentimes left me sad and confused. These three lovely young women seemed to make a game out of misunderstanding and hurting each other. Deborah Tannen's book, You Were Always Mom's Famous: Sisters in COnversation Throughout Their Lives, helped me to understand the competitiveness that runs through most sister relationships and the way that competitiveness affects their speech, choices, etc.