Verified by 
Review of Let’s Talk About Hard Things, by Anna Sale. Simon & Schuster. 288 pp. $27.
“White people don’t listen,” says Anpo Kuwa Win, a Native American who lives on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. “They are constantly thinking about what they’re going to say, what their response is, what their defense is, or what their excuse is.”
Alas, Anpo’s critique can be applied to so many of us. And with the decline of institutions, rituals, and conventions, journalist and podcaster Anna Sale points out, we must rely more and more on our own communications skills to handle conflict, disappointment, alienation, and loss.
In Let’s Talk About Hard Things, Sale draws on interviews with individuals from diverse backgrounds and the recommendations of experts to lay out effective ways to address five fraught topics: death, sex, money, family, and identity. Unsurprisingly, given her topic, Sale occasionally recycles clichés about communicating. Nonetheless, she understands that talking will not necessarily bridge differences or solve problems. She avoids one-size-fits-all recommendations. Instead, Sale provides powerful and poignant personal narratives to illuminate how we should talk, when, and to whom to get greater clarity, compassion, and connectedness in relationships with colleagues, kin, and friends.
Death, Sale emphasizes, is a shared as well as a self-evidently personal experience. She recommends foregoing platitudes, bearing witness to “the horror of loss,” and offering companionship to “beat back” the isolation associated with it. One woman, we learn, asked a friend whose partner had just died to text back an asterisk to confirm she was all right but at the moment preferred solitude. That said, solace often comes to those who are open about their grief. A terminally ill woman, Sale tells, taught her brother to “pre-grieve,” so he could mourn with honesty, an emotion different from what people call healing or moving on.
Talking openly with a partner about what you don’t know about sex, your desires, and turnoffs, Sale suggests, helps you figure out what you might enjoy doing together. When someone hurts you, through emotional betrayal or physical abuse, she writes, “you do not owe them a resolution.” Nor is it the responsibility of the person initiating a breakup to “take the sting away.” Disclosing previous hurts in subsequent romantic relationships, however, can “create closeness.” Most important, sexual desires “are not always so clear, and often are a moving target,” varying by life phase, among other factors.
As with sex, Sale notes, people may have different ideas about what to disclose in conversations about money. Many of us fear that revealing financial information will result in invidious comparisons with individuals we approach. Discretion, however, is not without costs. Revealing salaries to co-workers, for example, may shed light on inequities.
The primary goal of hard money conversations, Sale emphasizes, should be the identification of the components of problems we can control. Understanding our money personality type (vigilance, worship, status, or avoidance) and that of significant others provides insights into underlying values and behavior. Because borrowing and lending can poison relationships, choosing who to ask or assist is as important as what to say.
Talking about conflict in families, Sale writes, “is uniquely hard” because it often involves relitigating “guilt and blame, who said what, and which bridges were burned.” Family members must find ways to respond constructively to shifts over time in circumstances, affection, and power. They must decide whether they are more interested in a resolution or standing firm in their convictions. New revelations may disrupt family patterns, but if individuals give their own accounts of the same story, say out loud what they mean to each other, acknowledge limitations, and the timing is right, they can create space to reset family dynamics, so that “the dirt and dust of our worst days doesn’t cloud out the warmth and light of our best days.”
Inside and outside families, Sale reminds us, hard conversations about identity are increasing in frequency and intensity. They should begin with a recognition that identity is multi-layered, with privilege and disadvantage often operating simultaneously. To members of dominant identity groups, accounts of insults, biases, and systemic injustice can sound like indictments of crimes they do not believe they committed. Members of groups that have faced discrimination can’t be sure whether speaking up will be empowering, taxing, or futile. Compared to America’s long history of racism, Sale acknowledges, words seem meager, but the world won’t get better without more of them.
She’s right—for identity and so many tense and troubling topics.
