book review bittersweet

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In a relentlessly positive culture, a defense of melancholy

Why do sad songs lift the spirits? So begins “ Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole ” by Susan Cain, whose first book, “ Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking ,” was both a revelation and a revolution in the field of popular psychology when it was published in 2012. Cain, a former lawyer, masterfully argued in “Quiet” that a culture built for extroverts fails to understand and appreciate the gifts of introversion. The book liberated and celebrated the experience of inwardness amid the American obsession with outward “likability” and charismatic confidence. For Cain, the quiet remove of the introvert belied a thoughtful form of leadership in professional and personal life.

The book became a resounding success with readers, book clubs, universities and professional conferences, and transformed Cain into an unlikely but essential thought leader in a new era of self-help writing. Her accompanying TED talk has been viewed 30 million times. “Quiet” remains an intelligent, thorough and beautifully written work of popular psychology.

Ten years later, Cain returns with a lyrical exploration of a different mood. “Bittersweet” is a biography and celebration of the “melancholic” disposition in a culture fixated on relentless positivity. It’s the ennui Cain says she grappled with her whole life until she began to accept its creative possibilities. Suffering, loss and pain are not feelings simply to be medicated or avoided but instead to be processed, absorbed and relished. Drawing on the music of Leonard Cohen, psychological research and her own inheritance as a descendant of Holocaust victims, Cain delivers a book-length treatise on how to live alongside pain. As with the songs of Nina Simone or the writing of Maya Angelou, the art of suffering becomes the book’s central example to show how pain opens a path to beauty. The bitter is the sweet.

Is “Bittersweet” musicology, a biography of emotions, a heartfelt memoir or an airport self-help work? The answer seems unclear even after my second reading, but it certainly draws on all those genres in a style that mirrors the language of TED talks, graduation speeches and therapeutic podcasts. Cain is a poetic writer, and she is self-consciously publishing “Bittersweet” in a much more emotionally raw and revelatory moment than when “Quiet” was released. Vulnerability, emotional agility, inherited trauma and self-care are concepts that are now almost cliches in mainstream discourse around mental and personal health. The pandemic has only deepened the urgency and volume of those conversations.

At bookshops, self-help shelves no longer carry the sense of privacy or even shame I once associated with my own small collection when I first went searching for books to help me grapple with my mother’s death 20 years ago. Speaking one’s truth, along with radical vulnerability and empathy, are my generation’s lingua franca as we come to terms with structural failures in politics, education and identity inequalities. This is reflected in the success of author and podcaster Brené Brown and the syndicated public-radio show “ On Being ,” hosted by Krista Tippett. Feelings are having a moment and deserve their prophets and their literature.

“Bittersweet” is unfortunately not one of those books. I am neither a psychologist nor an academic, but I find the free-form methodology of psychological cartography here unconvincing and suspect. It is not original to suggest that melancholic music, sad films or heavy art opens emotional pathways to catharsis. For many cultures across the world, juxtapositions between the dark and the light have been central to their arts for centuries. In Indian classical music, Spanish flamenco and German orchestral composition, to name a few, the bittersweet is paramount. For Cain’s work to be successful at opening a new cultural conversation around sadness among American readers, it would have been helpful to be more precise in its purpose.

To focus on either the particularities of American toxic positivity or the history of darkness in 20th-century popular music could have benefited the argument. Instead, “Bittersweet” reads like a series of thought bubbles shoehorned into book form. With its blend of memoir, pop psychology, music criticism and self-help, there is an undisciplined interdisciplinarity to “Bittersweet” that fails to form a coherent and memorable whole. The book buckles under the weight of its ambitions, abruptly shifting among real-world examples of melancholic personalities, lived experiences and academic studies. It is also accompanied by an online quiz to test one’s own bittersweet tendency and a playlist of songs — some of the less-appealing attempts at accessibility.

There are seeds of several potentially beautiful books in various chapters that are quickly abandoned for a larger survey of the bittersweet disposition. Among the most powerful of those threads is Cain’s description of her once-estranged relationship with her mother, whom she learned to love despite the pain they caused each other.

I will confess that I am vulnerable to the quiet literature of interiority, to memoirs and emotional explorations of pain and repair. While “Bittersweet” is a noble and welcome effort to expand the language of vulnerability — and Cain remains a respected thought leader — the book suffers from hopscotch evidentiary support, a meandering structure and a sustained mood of inquiry. For a subject as relevant, that is indeed bittersweet.

Bilal Qureshi is a culture writer and radio journalist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, the New York Times and Newsweek, and on NPR.

Bittersweet

How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

By Susan Cain

Crown. 310 pp. $28

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BITTERSWEET

How sorrow and longing make us whole.

by Susan Cain ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2022

A beautifully written tribute to underappreciated emotions.

The author of Quiet turns her attention to sorrow and longing and how these emotions can be transformed into creativity and love.

Cain uses the term bittersweet to refer to a state of melancholy and specifically addresses individuals who have “a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.” With great compassion, she explores causes for these emotions by candidly chronicling her personal experiences and those of others throughout history who have suffered loss, including Plato, Charles Darwin, C.S. Lewis, Leonard Cohen, and Maya Angelou. “As Angelou’s story suggests,” she writes, “many people respond to loss by healing in others the wounds that they themselves have suf­fered.” Cain argues persuasively that these emotions can be channeled into artistic pursuits such as music, writing, dancing, or cooking, and by tapping into them, we can transform “the way we parent, the way we lead, the way we love, and the way we die.” If we don’t transform our sorrows and longings of the past, she writes, we may inflict them on present relationships through abuse, domination, or neglect. Throughout, the author examines the concept of loss from various religious viewpoints, and she looks at the ways loss can affect individuals and how we can integrate it into our lives to our benefit. Cain contends that the romantic view of melancholy has “waxed and waned” over the years. Currently, a “tyranny of positivity” can often be found in the workplace, and the “social code” of keeping negative feelings hidden abounds. However, she points out the benefits that can come from opening up versus keeping everything inside. As a first step, she encourages us to examine our lives and ask ourselves what we are longing for, in a deep and meaningful way, and if we can turn that ache into a creative offering.

Pub Date: April 5, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-451-49978-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022

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SEEN & HEARD

THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.

Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-670-88146-5

Page Count: 430

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY

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GREENLIGHTS

by Matthew McConaughey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 20, 2020

A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.

All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.

“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright —of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused , to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.

Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4

Page Count: 304

Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | SELF-HELP | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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‘Bittersweet’ Review: A Moving But Incomplete Analysis of Sorrow

Susan Cain entered the literary world with strength and momentum when she published her book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” in 2012. She shattered myths about what it means to be introverted and urged her readers to recognize that communities suffer when introverts are cast aside. Her work ignited a global conversation on communication, leadership, and how to value the quiet among us.

In her latest release, “Bittersweet,” Cain holds tight to that ambition and directly challenges a more deeply seated and culturally reinforced argument: Painful emotions are useless, shameful, and should be suppressed. Cain asserts that sorrow, longing, and grief allow for joy, love, compassion, and spiritual connection to be all the more meaningful. While this argument is moving, this book misses some crucial components of the conversation, diluting her claims in the process.

Cain uses her introduction as a much needed space to explain: What is bittersweetness? Cain defines it as “a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.” Employing a generous mix of case studies, personal anecdotes, and spiritual movements, she goes on to present chapters filled with examples of beauty spawned from embracing melancholy, and offers advice for how to move through loss, allow pain to inform leadership, and reckon with the inevitability of death.

This hodge-podge, though, of analytical paths keeps the book from being especially focused. Jumping from religious theory to social research to personal narrative and back again makes the book’s direction feel cyclical rather than forward-facing. The flowery, mystical language of religious and spiritual dogma stands in sharp contrast against the practical descriptions of leadership and communication development in the workplace, and it makes both of them harder to take seriously. All the thought avenues Cain explores are worth discussion, but in trying to do it at once, she risks drowning the most important ideas — and the reader — in a sea of theory, research, and memoir.

The manner in which Cain goes about presenting this mass of material to her reader, though, is commendable. The reading experience is both painful and cathartic as Cain, with a gentle hand, leads her readers down the intimidating path of more deeply considering their own emotional tendencies and well-being. The language is rarely convoluted or condescending, and Cain uses largely accessible research to support her ideas. She writes of well-known musicians, poets, and philosophers who embraced bittersweetness in their work and were all the better off for it. This book does a fabulous job of helping even the most unemotional reader connect the ideas of melancholy to the context of their own life. And ultimately, in facilitating this connection, it is the transformation from “pain into creativity, transcendence, and love” that Cain wants her readers to embrace.

The pain-to-creativity pipeline is well-documented; negative emotions often inspire great art. But Cain fails to acknowledge that sometimes pain, or more specifically, trauma are imposed upon people in sustained and unbearable ways. The creativity and transcendence described in this book are frequently occurring after distance has been created between the subject and the traumatic experiences. For many, though, there are social, economic, and racial factors that create a nearly constant state of traumatization. Bittersweetness is about the coexistence of light and dark and the ways in which this duality can be used to form more meaningful connections with other humans. But what happens when some humans force unnatural, man-made iterations of darkness into the lives of others?

The book never meaningfully addresses this conflict. Given its engagement with various realms of life and academia, this missing piece leaves a gaping hole: The practical, social, and historical implications of what it means to be sad.

Ultimately, “Bittersweet” achieves Cain’s goal: The reading experience forces her audience to consider that perhaps sorrow does serve a purpose, and that we should allow one another to welcome our negative emotions without judgment. The book is well-researched, well-written, and a necessary first step into an important conversation, but it is incomplete. It fails to acknowledge the way that social and economic forces often keep people in situations that make transforming past pain into creativity especially difficult. Sorrow cannot build bridges when it is intentionally and systematically perpetuated as a tool for subjugation and oppression.

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Bob on Books

Thoughts on books, reading, and life

Review: Bittersweet

Bittersweet , Susan Cain. New York: Crown, 2022.

Summary: Describes the state of bittersweetness, where sadness and joy, death and life, failure and growth, longing and love intersect and how this deepens our lives and has the power to draw us together.

About ten years ago, Susan Cain published Quiet , helping the extroverted world discover the power of introverts and what they bring us all. In this work, Cain explores why at least some of us like sad songs, rainy days, and react intensely to art?

She helps us enter into understanding bittersweet by telling the story of the cellist of Sarajevo, who during the worst of the shelling, appeared every day and played Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. It is a beautiful, sad, and evocative piece that capture both the beauty of pre-war Sarajevo and the terrible loss of the war. This is bittersweet, this embrace of sadness and the longing for beauty, for something beyond our fractured existence. Holding together these seemingly disparate experiences, Cain believes is the pathway to “creativity, transcendence, and love.” Bittersweet can draw us together in the shared experience of longing for the transcendent.

Cain explores the sources of our longings for the good, the true, and the beautiful, the wonder of those moments and yet their transience. She contends that it is the place of creativity. She talks about how we live with bittersweet in a world of relentless positivity whose mantra seems to be, “be happy.” She offers an insight into the mental health crisis on university campuses, where everyone has to project a put-together, perfect Instagram image of effortless perfection that no one can live up to. She contends that our understanding of bittersweet can transform workplaces, where we understand the other side of fantastic success is the risk of failure, where allowing workers to acknowledge their struggles releases them to work more freely and productively, knowing that we’re all strugglers here.

The material of the third part on mortality, impermanence, and grief was the most thought-provoking for me. It is framed with the death of her brother and father from COVID-19 and the descent of her mother into dementia, a mother with whom she has had a bittersweet relationship. In between, she narrates attending RAADfest, a gathering of people into radical life extension, who are in revolt against aging and death. While Cain, like all of us would like to live longer, she doesn’t believe the pursuit of deathlessness will lead to peace and harmony, but rather the acceptance of mortality and walking together in it has the power to draw us together. She believes that the embrace of bittersweet is the way out of inherited trauma, when we face and embrace the pain in the lives of our forebears and live with gratitude for their resilience and the gifts they passed on to us.

I found myself reacting in several ways to this book. One was that I recognized a strength Susan Cain has is to name what is often an inchoate sense many of us have. While her “quiz” at the beginning of the book suggests some score higher on the bittersweet scale than others, anyone who has lived enough life, or even through a pandemic grasps this tension of sorrow and wonder, of longing and hope within which we live. Cain’s genius is to name it and give the lie to the American (and often Christian) focus on being happy.

Cain develops her ideas through a series of stories of travels around the world and interviews with a number of insightful people. She is a storyteller, and sometimes, it is hard to keep track of the larger story she is rendering for all the stories. Only in going back over the book for this review did I get any sense of the development of her ideas. With that, I also found the book somewhat repetitive as she makes again and again the point that bittersweet gives meaning, and creativity, love and union with others to our existence. It felt to some degree that this is the world she wanted to be so.

Cain describes herself as moving from an agnosticism to something different, not exactly faith or belief in a particular conception of God. Yet it seems in the end, in an attempt to identify with universal human experience, all she can do is believe in the longing for something more. She quotes C. S. Lewis from Surprised by Joy , noting that “we have hunger because we need to eat, we have thirst because we need to drink; so if we have an ‘inconsolable longing’ that can’t be satisfied in this world, it must be because we belong to another, godly one” (pp. 53-54). Yet Lewis found the fulfillment of his longing not in longing but in God. I fear Cain’s argument is to embrace the hunger and the thirst, but not go on to where there is food and drink. I sense she believes that longing or bittersweet is its own satisfaction. I can’t help but wonder if there is a dark side to bittersweet not discussed here, the disillusionment and despair of a life of longing without finding. I found myself praying that she would find, and have the courage to accept, the “other” that she longs for.

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Bittersweet

How Sorrow And Longing Make Us Whole

In her latest #1 New York Times bestseller, the author of the bestselling phenomenon Quiet reveals the power of a bittersweet, melancholic outlook on life, and why our culture has been so blind to its value.

If you’ve ever wondered why you like sad music … If you find comfort or inspiration in a rainy day … If you react intensely to music, art, nature, and beauty …

Then you probably identify with the bittersweet state of mind.

With her mega-bestseller, Quiet , Susan Cain urged our society to cultivate space for the undervalued, indispensable introverts among us, thereby revealing an untapped power hidden in plain sight. Now, she employs the same mix of research, storytelling, and memoir to explore why we experience sorrow and longing, and the surprising lessons these states of mind teach us about creativity, compassion, leadership, spirituality, mortality and love.

Acclaim for Bittersweet

Susan Cain’s Bittersweet grabs you by the heart and doesn’t let go. I’ve thought about the depth and beauty in Cain’s research and storytelling every day since I finished the book. I will always be grateful for how much Quiet and Bittersweet have helped me understand myself and how I engage with the world.

—Brené Brown, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Atlas of the Heart

A decade ago, I found myself inside Quiet . With Bittersweet , Susan Cain has described and validated my existence once again! Her new book reaffirms that my constant, achy awareness of life’s brutiful is a way of being shared across the ages with artists, healers, and anyone who pays deep attention. I’ll place Bittersweet in the hands of all my feely, achy, beautiful friends.

—Glennon Doyle, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Untamed and founder and president of Together Rising

This is the rare book that doesn’t just open your eyes—it touches your heart and sings to your soul. Susan Cain gave a voice to introverts, and now she masterfully paints our heaviest emotions in a light that’s long overdue. Bittersweet is the perfect cure for toxic positivity and a sparkling ode to the beauty of the human condition.

—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again

Bittersweet  is astonishing: one of the most gracefully written, palpably human books I’ve read in years.

—Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of DRIVE

This book is an absolute triumph: it’s for anyone who has ever really lived, loved, or lost.

—Greg McKeown, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Effortless

Bittersweet is an incredibly uplifting book—transcendent even.

— Writer’s Digest

An antidote for our uncertain times and a toolbox for using angst and yearning as a means of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love.

— Oprah Daily

Cain has written a gorgeous, compassionate, companionate book.

— Toronto Star

An original and contrarian thinker, Susan Cain compellingly argues that the messier parts of life might indirectly lead us to the most rewarding parts of it.

— Seattle Times

Bittersweet  is a beautiful read in its entirety.

—Maria Popova, The Marginalian

Susan Cain finds what is undervalued, quiet, and precious. In  Bittersweet  she takes you to a room in your own heart full of treasures that you had forgotten about. This is a book to read, feel, and savor.

—Jonathan Haidt

Bittersweet …resists classification, hovering like a butterfly between poetic mysticism and social psychology, as it dips into philosophy and Buddhism in search of the correlation between beauty and sadness.”

—Ian McFarlane, The Canberra Times

Named BITTERSWEET one of the “Best Self Help Books On Topics That Matter Most” !

— The Wall Street Journal

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Bittersweet Playlist

Here’s the companion playlist to the new book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole! The book reveals the power of a bittersweet, even melancholic, outlook on life, and why our culture has been so blind to its value.

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Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole Audio CD – CD, April 5, 2022

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• Language English
• Publisher Random House Audio
• Publication date April 5, 2022
• Dimensions 5.09 x 1.16 x 5.9 inches
• ISBN-10 0593506057
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Audio; Unabridged edition (April 5, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593506057
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593506059
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.09 x 1.16 x 5.9 inches
• #3,375 in Popular Psychology Personality Study
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• #12,791 in Spiritual Self-Help (Books)

About the author

SUSAN CAIN is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, and BITTERSWEET: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. She has spent the last twenty years exploring a particular realm of human nature: the quiet, the sensitive, the thoughtful, the bittersweet. It has always seemed clear to her - and to her millions of readers - that this way of being can lead to a richer, deeper form of happiness. Susan’s books have been translated into 40+ languages, and her record-smashing TED talks have been viewed over 50 million times on TED and YouTube combined. Susan is the host of the Audible series, A QUIET LIFE IN SEVEN STEPS, and the QUIET LIFE online community. Join her on Substack at TheQuietLife dot net.

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Eustea Reads

A life in books and tea, book review: bittersweet by susan cain.

I haven’t read Quiet but when I heard about the idea behind Bittersweet, I was immediately intrigued. The subtitle of this book is “how sorrow and longing make us whole” and that is not really an idea that I hear about a lot. Most people, even if they are striving for contentment instead of happiness, try to avoid being sad or sorrowful.

But as Cain shows, the bittersweet feelings have a purpose. The first part of the book looks at the purpose of sadness, why we long for things like “the perfect love” and how to cope with losing a love, and how creativity is associated with sorrow. Cain writes that

“studies have found that sad moods tend to sharpen our attention: They make us more focused and detail oriented; they improve our memories, correct our cognitive biases.”

Of course, this is only if the sad feelings don’t lead to depression, which definitely destroys creativity.

I won’t talk too much on the chapters of love because Cain references Alain de Botton’s idea, which ar basically what he covers in his book The Course of Love .

Part Two of Bittersweet looks at the “tyranny of positivity”. This section is perhaps the most American-centric, as it looks at how the cult of positivity has become embedded in America. But given America’s soft power and its ability to export its culture via movies, books, etc, it’s worth reading these chapters to see if something resonates.

The third and final part of the book covers mortality and grief. My takeaway from this chapter is that the awareness of the impermanence of life shapes our decision making. And this isn’t limited to older folks – young people facing their mortality made their decisions in a way similar to the elderly. This isn’t very related to the discussion of how facing our mortality affects us, but I really liked this haiku by Issa that Cain shares:

“It is true That this world of dew Is a world of dew. But even so…”

The translation breaks the haiku format but it is still a haunting poem.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I really liked this book. I think that it’s very true that we have embraced a cult of toxic positivity, to the extent that we do not allow ourselves space to acknowledge our negative emotions. And as Cain shows, the ‘darker’ emotions have positive effects on us – on our creativity and our mental health in general. I think it’s worth reading Bittersweet to reframe how we see things and hopefully, how we deal with negative experiences the next time they appear in our lives.

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2 thoughts on “ Book Review: Bittersweet by Susan Cain ”

I like how you mentioned America’s “soft power” as it seeps into life in almost every country and can have impacts we don’t think of. I don’t think this is a book I’ll be picking up but it sounds like it was an interesting read

I swear, if you start looking for American influence (like just how people are talking about issues), you’ll end up finding that a lot of the English-speaking internet sound like America! Yet… different countries have different histories and thus need to contextualise their problems differently, so I am worried about all this influence.

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Book Review: Bittersweet How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

• Book Reviews
• Friday, 19 August 2022

Book review by Karen R. Koenig, LCSW, MEd originally published at the NY Journal of Books

In Bittersweet Susan Cain explains why it’s crucial to embrace all our emotions, especially those that are bittersweet. She takes on this nation’s pursuit of perpetual positivity with the same gusto, erudition, compassion, and thoughtfulness that made her book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking , a bestseller.  

Cain describes the emotion of bittersweet as “longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world” along with recognition that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired.” She even provides a short quiz to help readers determine if they lean temperamentally toward sanguine or bittersweet or travel between the two states.

A lifelong devotee of Canadian singer-songwriter, poet and novelist Leonard Cohen, Cain uses examples from his life and evocative works to illustrate how sorrow and longing come together time and again to produce something altogether beautiful and magical. Born of Cohen’s own pain, his work manages to touch us all deeply and remind us of our suffering while at the same time lifting us out of it because it is shared. His is among the numerous fascinating stories, including her own very personal one, that Cain uses to bring home her points.

Part one of the book is about sorrow and longing. Cain describes all the good sadness can do for us, including triggering compassion, which is hardwired into humans to help us bond with each other. Experiencing our own sadness allows us to empathize when others feel sad, increasing our connection to them.

The author details how “negative” emotions, those that cause pain rather than pleasure, have been viewed through the lens of modern psychology. While Sigmund Freud analyzed angst and neuroticism, psychologists Abraham Maslow and Martin Seligman aimed to lift our spirits by teaching us to focus on positive emotions such as gratitude.

Cain and others in the field have intentionally swung the pendulum back to embrace sorrow and longing, giving these feelings their rightful place in the emotional arena. She explains that longing and sadness should not be conflated with depression or malaise, maintaining that “If we could honor sadness a little more, maybe we could see it —rather than enforced smiles and righteous outrage—as the bridge we need to connect with each other.”

Exploring longing, Cain explains how yearning for a “soul mate” is perhaps universal, but not reality-based where the best we can do is appreciate the partners we have. She explores creativity born of longing—in art, literature, poetry and music—as movement from darkness to light and as desire sparking momentum in a quest for union or transcendence. And in both theoretical and practical terms, she teaches us how best to cope with longing due to lost love.

Part two of the book examines how our culture came to fear emotions like sorrow and longing and single-mindedly embrace positivity while other societies opened their hearts and minds to a fuller range of emotions. She views American contempt for “negative” emotions as stemming from our rigid cultural beliefs about rugged individualism in which “we’re encouraged to see ourselves, deep down, as winners or losers—and to show, with our sanguine-choleric behaviors, that we belong to the former group.”

She illustrates how this country has buried the horrors of its history and spun its tragedies and failures into distortions to avoid feeling discomfort and shame: The point of our American exceptionalism is to blind ourselves and others to everything but our successes and the good we’ve done and to outrun failure by achieving perfection. Sadly, this has turned us into a culture so bereft of compassion that we must distance ourselves from our losses and those who are losers and, in doing so, have forsaken our humanity. Paradoxically, this armored mindset has left us with more, not less, depression, anxiety, anger, addiction, and suicides, as ghosted emotions come back to haunt us as we should have known they would.

Cain describes how the “tyranny of positivity” in the workplace squelches authentic emotion—especially vulnerability and sadness which are equated with weakness—and refuses to accept failure. She then provides examples of workplace and community leaders who are reversing this trend by using self-expression, compassion, and sharing emotional pain to help people become more whole and mentally healthy to fulfill their roles more successfully.

Part three takes us more deeply into bittersweetness: the recognition that what once was will never be again and accepting that life is impermanent while trying to live it to its fullest. Cain examines the growing Immortalism movement—death defiers who believe we can and should live forever. And she gives voice to their challengers, some of whom fear we would be less human without mortality.

Cain’s resolution for the dilemma of having life thrust upon us while knowing we will die is human connection. “We transcend grief only when we realize that we’re connected with all the other humans who can’t transcend grief.” She proposes that “living in a bittersweet state, with an intense awareness of life’s fragility and the pain of separation, is an underappreciated strength and an unexpected path to wisdom, joy and especially communion.” We do this by allowing ourselves to enter a state of poignancy, by letting our perspective narrow and deepen to what really matters, which generally happens as we age.

Last, Cain tackles “how we can transform the sorrows and longings we inherit from the generations who came before us.” This inheritance is all too real, passed down from parent to child, according to research, psychologically and physiologically and exemplified by a genetic effect called “preconception parental trauma.” Because of this inheritance, post-traumatic stress travels through generations, but Cain explains, so does transgenerational healing which comes through understanding traumatic inheritance, helping others who are wounded, and making meaning of suffering.

The book ends with Cain describing her own longings to write and what made her finally honor them. Encouraging readers to identify and attend to their longings and dreams, she asks, “What is the thing you long for most, your unique imprint, singular mission, wordless calling? What is your closest approximation of home?” She asks readers to question who they love and admire, what their melancholy is trying to wring from them, and what is left for them to do or be in life.

Challenging our individual and cultural beliefs, Bittersweet grants us permission to explore and experience sorrow and longing by transforming them into acceptable, inspiring, even hopeful emotions that help us heal and grow.

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• How Positive Self-talk Improves Your Relationship ...

Bittersweet: A Novel

• By Colleen McCullough
• Simon & Schuster
• Reviewed by JR Scrafford
• September 22, 2014

Four sisters, with little but each other, fight to overcome limited opportunities in the face of the Great Depression.

“Nothing is so sweet that there is no tinge of bitter in it.” So concludes Bittersweet , Colleen McCullough’s tale of four sisters who take one of the few professional avenues open to them in the early 20th century: nursing. They all embark on the career for their own reasons, but the one constant is their love for each other, and this drives the storytelling. However, even the sweetness of their love for each other cannot outweigh the bitterness of the compromises life forces them to make.

The Aussie McCullough is perhaps best known for her novel (and subsequent television miniseries) The Thorn Birds , a saga of forbidden love between a woman and a priest. The book proved so popular, it was listed by the British public at No. 64 in the BBC’s Big Read . McCullough herself was interested in medical school but developed an allergy to the surgical soap. Instead, she studied neuroscience in Sydney and eventually at Yale. The success of her novels allowed her to give up medicine and write full time.

With the same biological father but two mothers, the four Australian sisters in Bittersweet are comprised of two sets of twins. Edda and Grace are 20 months older than Tufts and Kitty. The four Latimer girls have their own dreams: Edda, to be a doctor; Grace, to marry; Tufts, to have a stimulating career; and Kitty, to escape the burden of being a renowned beauty.

They enroll in a new program to become registered nurses at the local hospital in New South Wales, but hit roadblocks and detours that transform their goals and their relationships. The novel also explores the politics of the time and the growing realization that the Great Depression is real and disastrous.

The first to leave school is Grace. She meets a traveling salesman and feels an immediate connection; they soon marry. But Bear, Grace’s husband, does not survive the Depression, and Grace must become her own person and the mother her children need.

A few years after Grace, Kitty leaves school to marry Charles Burton, a rich heir and an Englishman. He takes over the hospital and makes some welcome changes. Unfortunately, the traits that enable him to force through these improvements — assertiveness, a domineering attitude, the belief that he is never wrong — are the same ones that may destroy the marriage.

Tufts makes it through nursing school to rise to success in the hospital administration, but must fight for her relationship with a colleague with a history of scandal. (Their relationship was a highlight of the novel for this reader.)

The final sister, Edda, spent her life wishing she could go to medical school. That goal is finally fulfilled through a mutually beneficial, if not romantically inclined, marriage, but will it be accepted by society and, most important, by her sisters?

I found McCullough’s use of twins and closely connected sisters to be an identifiable and compelling storytelling device. As Edda explains, “As you get to know the Latimer sisters better, you’ll find that for two sets of identical twins, the similarities in each set are perfectly delineated in the one yet warped in the other, as in a sideshow hall of mirrors.” It creates tension between the sisters because they are so different, and it also allows the author to exploit those differences for her own plot advancement.

There are several jarring and blunt moments in the novel that made me want to throw my hands in the air. When characters meet, they tend to make abrupt (and vocal) snap judgments about one other. When Kitty meets her future husband for the first time in a professional setting, for example, he immediately proposes marriage: “There is only one position I’d offer you — that of my wife…I adore you. I am your slave, your prisoner of love.” That instant familiarity happens repeatedly and feels artificial.

Men are given short shrift throughout the novel. They are largely one-dimensional — needy or banal. They are the outsiders. The focus of the story is always on the sisters, to the detriment of the well-rounded male characters. One example of this is the girls’ father, who provides a sounding board and a rational heart. He is a joyful character, and I loved every time we meet up with him; alas, it was never enough.

Still, despite its flaws, McCullough’s Bittersweet — although not her best work — is a compelling story for those of us who love our sisters and love to root for the underdog.

JR Scrafford is a senior review editor for the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Support the Independent by purchasing this title via our affliate links: Amazon.com Or through Bookshop.org

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A tender, funny puzzle of a tale examining the life, such as it is, of a young literature student

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A Bittersweet Toast to Retirement

A New York Times Magazine article captured the final working days of seven Americans who expressed joy, fear and anxiety about the next chapter of their lives.

By Josh Ocampo

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

A surgeon in Rochester, Minn. A TV-news traffic anchor in Chicago. A church organist in Ellwood City, Pa.

For a recent issue of The New York Times Magazine themed around retirement, the writer Charley Locke and the photographer Victor Llorente wanted to answer one question: How do Americans mark the end of their careers?

In February, Kathy Ryan, the magazine’s director of photography, and Shannon Simon, a photo editor, pitched an idea for a photo essay documenting the final working days of Americans. They joined forces with Ms. Locke, Mr. Llorente and Mark Jannot, an editor at the magazine, to see it through.

Beginning in March, Ms. Locke and Mr. Llorente set out to capture a momentous transition in the lives of seven individuals who shared stories of joy, regret and bittersweet enthusiasm about leaving the work force.

“Their jobs are a huge part of who they are,” Ms. Locke said in a recent conversation. “This is a transition with a lot of complicated emotions — fear, excitement and feeling like their identity is changing.”

She interviewed the almost-retirees over several weeks. Mr. Llorente spent about a month traveling across the country to photograph the subjects on their final days on the job. In mid-April, he observed a professional D.J. spinning his last songs. Just two weeks later, he shadowed a Postal Service worker on her final delivery route.

In an interview, Mr. Llorente and Ms. Locke discussed the extraordinary challenges of finding sources and why the article meant so much to the new retirees. These are edited excerpts.

How did this project come together?

CHARLEY LOCKE I mostly write about kids and elders in America. When Mark reached out to me about this idea for the Retirement Issue, I was really excited about the possibility of doing something around what retirement looks like for most Americans. We first talked about the story being about retirement rituals — I was looking for today’s version of how employers used to give longtime employees a gold watch to mark their last days. But the reporting and the sourcing were really surprising.

Fewer people work at the same company for decades, and fewer jobs are covered by union protections , which often have those traditions. Most Americans don’t have a set ritual around the end of work, so their loved ones figure out a way to honor them. This story ended up being about individual experiences of retirement.

How did you find sources?

LOCKE This is the most challenging story I’ve ever reported. I talked to hundreds of people for this article — union leaders, fire and police chiefs, public relations representatives and media spokespeople. I did a lot of cold calling. I would call people and say: “I’m working on a story about retirement. Do you happen to know anyone who’s retiring?” I found Sheila Giuntoli, the Postal Service worker, because I was searching on Facebook for events in different cities that had the word “retirement” in the name of the event. Sheila’s daughter was throwing her a surprise retirement party, so I messaged her.

Victor, what did you want to capture with the photography?

VICTOR LLORENTE There were two kinds of shots that I had in mind: a celebration moment and people doing their jobs. The celebration moment was a little harder because some of the subjects didn’t have anything big or eventful planned, like Arthur Jay, a fabric-store owner. But you never knew what was going to happen because it was their last day. For me, it was just about showing up.

You shadowed a TV-news traffic anchor in Chicago, a D.J. in Cincinnati and a firefighter in Dolton, Ill., on his final 24-hour shift. What was it like spending a day at a fire station?

LLORENTE I’ve been doing a lot of portraiture recently, so my photo shoots are usually pretty short. But this was going to be 24 hours. I got there early, at 7 a.m., because the firefighter started his shift then. There was a lot of downtime, and Dolton is a small town. The firefighters weren’t getting a lot of calls. They responded to three or four calls in 24 hours. I went to sleep around 11:30 p.m. They told me, “You got to sleep with your clothes on in case the alarm goes off.”

Were there any stories you wanted to include, but couldn’t?

LOCKE There was the director of the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage who just retired. We weren’t able to include him because of timing issues. He told me that on his last day, he planned to walk around the zoo, saying goodbye to his favorite animals, including Oreo, a female brown bear who he had raised since she was a cub.

You both captured personal moments in these retirees’ lives. Were people generally eager to open up and share their stories?

LOCKE People were really excited to talk about their long careers and proud of what they had accomplished. A number of subjects told me that they had been disappointed retirement hadn’t felt like a big deal. But being part of this — talking to me about it and spending time with Victor — marked a transition into a different time in their lives.

I had some really poignant, moving conversations with people, including some about their regrets around work. Arthur Jay, the fabric-store owner, talked a lot about how he hadn’t thought this was how he would spend his life, and how he had missed time with his sons who were growing up at home. A number of other subjects shared those feelings, and felt really unsure about what comes next.

LLORENTE Mr. Jay was one of my favorites. He took me to lunch on his last day. We got his favorite roast beef sandwich. But to Charley’s point about marking the moment, I definitely felt that. Roz Varon, the TV-news traffic anchor, kept introducing me to people as “her photographer.” You could tell she was really happy I was there. And I was really proud to be there, because she’s going to look back at those photos.

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Crime and thrillers of the month – review

A surprise final novel from the amazing mind of the late Mo Hayder; a race against time between a father and the FBI; and a knowing riff on the premise of Jurassic Park

M o Hayder is the author of some of the most genuinely terrifying and brilliant thrillers out there: the ending of Hanging Hill lingers in a dark corner of my brain, while her tortured, tragic detective Jack Caffrey and the horribly disturbing crimes he takes on are unforgettable (if you’ve not read the books, you may have seen him in the recent adaptation of Wolf ). Hayder died in 2021, and Bonehead (Hodder & Stoughton) is a surprise final novel. It goes to places as blackly nightmarish as ever. Our protagonist is Alex Mullins, a police officer in Gloucestershire who, as a teenager, survived a coach crash into a lake that killed some of her classmates. She’s back in the village where it happened, determined to get to the bottom of the vision of a skeletal woman she believes she saw that awful night – a local legend known as the Bonehead, who brings bad luck with her. “The woman, went the story, had been a prostitute, a Gypsy, who at some point in the past century had been murdered in the park by a john and thrown into a ravine. Her face had been eaten back to the bone by rats and foxes, but her body remained, miraculously mummified, so her killer went back time and again to have sex with the faceless corpse.” Delving into superstition, rumours and tragedy in this small community, as the sense of looming menace that only this author can summon so successfully grows, Bonehead is as shocking and sinister as anything Hayder has written. It is an unexpected, bittersweet treat to be back in the hands of one of our very best crime writers.

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Abir Mukherjee’s Hunted (Harvill Secker) opens as a bomb goes off in an LA shopping mall and the suicide bomber is identified as a Muslim girl from England. Sajid Khan, who works in Heathrow airport, spares the event a passing thought: “With suicide bombings … it was taken as fact that the attackers would be Islamists, and suddenly a few hundred extremists with a death wish were taken as proxy for a billion people, and as a brown man, everything became more difficult.” But then he learns from armed police who arrest him that his daughter, Aliyah, entered the US with the bomber and has now gone missing. When he is contacted by a woman who says she believes her son, Greg, is with Aliyah, Sajid is sceptical but eventually convinced, and they embark on a desperate attempt to find their children before the FBI does. Switching between the perspectives of Shreya, the FBI agent trying to prevent another bombing, Sajid and Greg, this is a race-against-time story with some excellent twists and subversions of expectations.

Kellye Garrett’s Missing White Woman (Simon & Schuster) opens with a quote from the US journalist Gwen Ifill that explains the title: “I call it the missing white woman syndrome. If there is a missing white woman, you’re going to cover that every day.” The missing white woman in this story is dog walker Janelle Beckett; our heroine is Breanna, on a romantic getaway to New York with her new boyfriend, Tyler. Tyler has been a little preoccupied with work, and at first Bree isn’t worried when she wakes late to find him gone; he’s probably in the office. But then she discovers the body of a blond woman in the foyer, and when the police arrive and start asking questions, Ty can’t be found. “A dead white woman. A missing Black man. They’d say he did it. That he was on the run.” With a social media mob on the hunt for #Justice4Janelle, and old secrets coming to light, Bree finds herself backed into a corner. This is a clever and compelling thriller packed with great characters. I read it in one big gulp.

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should,” says Jeff Goldblum’s character, Ian Malcolm, in the film adaptation of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park . The line could equally be applied to Douglas Preston’s rollercoaster of a ride Extinction (Head of Zeus), in which the super-rich can take a trip to an exclusive park, Erebus Resort, in the Colorado Rockies, where woolly mammoths, Irish elk and giant ground sloths have been revived thanks to genetic manipulation. Then a couple are kidnapped at the resort, and local law enforcement are called in. Something strange is going on at Erebus, however, and the killings mount as Colorado Bureau of Investigation agent Frances Cash and county sheriff James Colcord investigate. Preston is having enormous amounts of fun here, riffing off science that is already out there, nodding frequently and knowingly to Jurassic Park , and bringing his ancient megafauna to glorious life (I’d definitely take a trip to Erebus, murders aside). It’s riveting, creative and bound to be a movie. Let’s just hope Goldblum is available to help out.

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Most viewed.

My family booked first-class 'apartment' seats for an 8-hour Etihad Airways flight. I can see why the private airplane rooms cost $6,000 a pop.

• My family of four used travel points to book a first-class flight on Etihad Airways.
• The luxurious "apartments" typically cost $6,000 a person, but we paid about $33 each.
• It was great, from the personalized check-in process to the amazing meal and  in-flight showers .

My husband is a frequent business traveler, so we're constantly trying to maximize his travel points to pay for some amazing trips for us and our two kids.

Flying has been hectic and nightmarish lately, but letting the best redemption opportunities steer our travel plans has led to more comfortable and luxurious vacations.

Last year, my husband and I planned our family of four's most epic trip yet: flying around the world on 11 different airlines across four continents over 70 days.

Booking Etihad Airways' first-class "apartments" for our flight from Abu Dhabi and London was easily the best redemption of the trip.

Here's what it was like.

We redeemed our travel points to drastically reduce the cost of our tickets.

We have lots of American Airlines points through the company's AAdvantage program, and Etihad is one of its partner airlines .

Although finding award availability on partner airlines can be challenging, the values can be tremendous. In our case, we took advantage of our family's flexible schedule to find last-minute unsold inventory, which is often released just days before the flight.

If your travel plans allow you to book (or, in our case, modify) your flights last minute, you can often find multiple seats on these "unicorn" flights.

The first-class apartment seats we booked on Etihad typically cost more than $6,000 per person. But we redeemed 62,500 AAdvantage miles (and paid $33 per person) for our flights.

We checked in early in the morning.

Instead of the typical airport check-in lines, Etihad's first-class area had sit-down desks with concierge-level services.

Traveling with children can be stressful, but being in a quiet terminal with a personalized experience made it incredibly easy and enjoyable.

From there, we went to the first-class lounge.

We were booked on the final flight using the "old" lounge at Zayed International Airport as Etihad was moving to a new terminal later that morning.

The employees were happy and accommodating, even if the energy seemed bittersweet as they prepared to shut off the lights behind us.

There were fewer than 10 guests in the airport lounge , and we found the service impeccable. After enjoying a fantastic made-to-order breakfast, we had coffee and a mimosa (for the adults) while relaxing before boarding.

We couldn't believe how awesome the apartments were.

The single-passenger apartments on the A380 have closing doors, a three-seater couch that converts to a bed, and a comfortable recliner chair.

Since we booked only a few days in advance, we had less control over seating choices . It was a bit of a struggle at first because we didn't want to end up too far away from our kids.

Luckily, once we boarded, the flight attendants helped move the children to adjoining rooms near us. There were only two other people riding first class, so it wasn't very difficult.

The freebies and perks continued on the plane.

Before departing, we each got a set of comfortable pajamas and slippers.

The adults also enjoyed another complimentary glass of Champagne, and everyone made their lunch selections from the extensive menu.

My husband and I got our own little date on the flight.

The flight attendant asked if my husband and I wanted a "date" for our in-flight meal , which involved setting a table for two in my husband's apartment.

We started with caviar and more bubbly, then my husband had the Arabic mezze and I had the burrata. Both appetizers were exceptional.

For our mains, we both had the well-prepared beef tenderloin. A cheese selection, chocolate, and more wine followed, and everything was amazing.

Lunch was the main event on this flight, but another simple meal was served about an hour before landing in London.

Once we finished lunch, our couches were converted into beds.

Once lunch was over, the attendants came around and converted all of our couches so they were completely reclined.

Our kids were very excited to eat their ice cream in bed.

The flight was eight hours, and the comfortable beds allowed us to get a couple of hours of sleep.

My husband and daughter opted to try out the shower in the sky

Passengers in the apartments can reserve free shower times at the beginning, middle, or end of the flight.

My husband and daughter both chose to end their flight with a shower. During their 30-minute time slots, they each got five minutes of hot water — which could be paused at any time.

Overall, this was an exceptional way to redeem our points.

The Etihad apartments are one of the most luxurious commercial flight options in the world.

Although it took planning, flexibility, and a little luck, I think this was an incredible use of our travel points.

The value of paying about $30 for a $6,000 experience alone had me sold, but every aspect of our trip was outstanding — from the check-in process to the in-flight meals.

I highly recommend it if you ever have the chance (and the points).

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