Recognized language and social interaction scholar Kristine Muñoz (née Fitch) makes a significant departure from her usual methodological orientation in this book, which is testimony to a methodological conundrum that scholars with an interest in the observable use of discursive resources often face: How does one go about transcribing what a speaker leaves unsaid? How are we to create a record of silences between interlocutors that last weeks, years, or even decades? Is it possible to document silence in a way that can be shared with, and scrutinized by, fellow scholars? And, perhaps the most pressing issue for someone who shares Muñoz's background in the ethnography of communication: How do we transcribe communicatively rich silences in a way that allows the analyst to capture their situated meanings for the interlocutors themselves, particularly meanings that defy verbal representation?

Muñoz answers these questions in two moves. First, in the introduction, she exposes the limitations of the reductionist social scientific approach to representing silence in interaction. The main target of her criticism—conversation analysis—limits the study of silence to the analysis of such micro-details as gaps and pauses. Such details are readily recordable and measurable and, as such, can immediately be subjected to analysis. However, Muñoz argues, gaps and pauses represent a very small range of conversational silences speakers utilize and experience. Her suggestion is to study all instances of the unsaid and the unsayable that speech community members overtly mark or implicitly interpret as such. It is possible to collect examples of speakers commenting on notable silences. It is also possible to document silences that result from what Muñoz calls the plastic properties of language use: polysemy, ambiguity, and strategy. ‘These plastic parts’, she writes, ‘allow meaning to emerge in the spaces between what is said, what is done, and what is in the end understood (or misunderstood)’ (p. 29). What remains unsaid, she points, out, and how the unsaid acquires meaning, are subject not only to cultural variation but also to the interaction between the relational histories of particular speakers and the cultural norms and expectations of the communities in which those speakers live and interact.

Second, Muñoz introduces a distinction between a social scientific and a narrative approach to the study of silences in and across speech communities, and dedicates the remainder of the book to exploring the potential of the latter approach. In Part I of the book she uses ethnographic narratives to ‘transcribe’ significant interactional silences in her own life experience as a student, a researcher, a department chair, a daughter, a mother, the wife of a Columbian man, and a vegetarian. Part II is a collection of five fictional narratives about silences in various kinds of interpersonal relationships and crises. The reader finds a ‘Reflections and expansions’ section at the end of all ethnographic and fictional narratives where Muñoz offers reflection questions and points to further readings. The concluding chapter introduces readers to the challenges and possibilities of teaching and learning ethnographic writing.