I really enjoyed this book, actually more than Susan Cain's first book, Quiet. In Bittersweet, Cain explains how feelings of longing and melancholy are normal, and part of how we grow and mature and evolve as human beings. Very fascinating studies are represented concerning these often mistaken emotions and how they are processed. I enjoyed the book so much, I've bought a hard copy and have highlighted sections for others to read and discuss. Of course the book does not dismiss true certifiable mental health conditions, but it does give comfort and reassurance that sometimes feeling "a bit down" is perfectly normal.

Thank you so much to NetGalley for providing a digital copy to review.

What Quiet did for a personality characteristic Bittersweet does for a particular feeling. Susan Cain explores the profound ways in which sorrow, longing and sadness define the human experience.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sharing this book with me. All thoughts are my own.

I've been a fan of Susan Cain since Quiet came out and Bittersweet is just as lovely and thought-provoking. It was different than I'd expected from reading the blurb but was a rich and fulfilling read all the same. A celebration of the mysteries and complexities of the human spirit, and our attraction to the poignant, to all the little things and the big that fill us with longing.

I really enjoyed Susan Cain's first work, Quiet, but I didn't think that Bittersweet lived up to Quiet. I think she pushed the topic a bit further than her comfort zone.

I love this book and am so thankful for the topics the author Susan Cain writes upon. Bittersweet is a feeling I have never seen explored before and has made me feel less alone with this emotion. Life goes fast and it is impossible to hold fast to the continuum that it is no matter how hard we try. Just like her book Quiet, this will remain on my keeper shelf forever. I loved how she introduces us to the creator of the Disney movie Inside Out where we are reminded why sadness is important and then she expands on this throughout with a wide range of relatable examples. Hang in there!! What you are feeling isn’t wrong or something to be afraid of, it’s actually meaningful! I want to add even though I received this digital copy from the publisher, I loved it so much I purchased the hardcover and audiobook and have and will continue to gift to all I know.

This thorough and superb presentation of the age-old question of the purpose of sorrow and longing celebrates the role that sadness plays in the full experience of human existence. Drawing from art, music, religion, psychology, philosophy, and other perspectives, Susan Cain provides a compelling case for the importance of allowing feelings of grief and melancholy to exist alongside an American penchant for positivity and optimism.

Cain’s beautiful exploration of the bittersweet culminates in a thoughtful examination of how the presence of death and longing can help us recognize the workings of the spiritual, inspire a sense of connectivity, enhance our relationships with others, and establish a sense of presence and purpose.

I read Bittersweet slowly over a period of several weeks because each page contained much to ponder and consider. I was profoundly moved by the knowledge contained within its pages.

Thank you to NetGalley and Crown Publishing for providing me with the opportunity to enjoy a free electronic copy of this book. My review is voluntary and reflects my honest opinion.

Susan Cain’s most recent non-fiction offering, "Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole" (Crown, 2022), introduces her conceptual understanding of the tendency towards “the melancholic direction.”

Bittersweet, according to Cain’s newly developed understanding, is one’s inclination to conditions of poignancy, sadness, and yearning; a joyful, yet striking and painful ache at the beauty of the world; and heightened perception of the passing of time. (However, bittersweet, melancholy tones are not to be confused with depression, though there often is a correlation between the two.)

Rife with her usual in-depth, often in-person, research, Cain explores the varied realms of the bittersweet across centuries, religions, arts (especially music), and philosophical branches. She also weaves her own familial narrative throughout, including her own moving Covid-19 experiences, which temper the book from weighing too heavily on the research side.

For lovers of Susan Cain’s prior books, such as "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking" (Crown, 2012); Susan David’s "Emotional Agility"; Tarana Burke’s "Unbound"; Tara Brach’s "Radical Acceptance" and "Radical Compassion" books; and works by Brene Brown, and Roshi Joan Halifax.

Thank you to NetGalley and Crown for the advance e-reading copy.

There's a lot to learn and love in this book. I marked pages to go back and reread, to share with others, to consider again. Loved the stories and illustrative examples.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC: Bittersweet should be read by almost everyone. Cain carefully and scientifically explores the utility of sadness in our lives: the "negative" emotion that leads to empathy and understanding. She doesn't just debunk the Tyranny of Positive Thinking, but offers alternatives that embrace the full spectrum of human emotions. This book encompasses psychological research, a modicum of eminently practical and science based self help and personal memoir that serves to illustrate the need to accept sadness and value it and use it productively. The author's website has resources and offers bulleted "take aways" from the book. Her previous book "Quiet" was a tremendous resource and "Bittersweet" with its wider scope is solid resource that will serve almost everyone. Sadness drives creativity, empathy and more. I can't recommend this book strongly enough.

I absolutely loved this book and all of the beauty, intellect, emotion, and poignancy it held. As a highly sensitive, “bittersweet” human, these words felt like gold to me.

I loved Ms. Cain’s last book so I was over the moon to get this. I kept starting and stopping. It just didn’t resonate with me. I feel that by not loving Leonard Cohen like she kept me out of the book. She just kept bringing it up. Not everyone loves him or even knows who he is. The fact that the whole thesis rides in his back is asking a lot of a reader here for Ms. Cain, not Mr. Cohen.

The world is definitely better with this book in it - Susan Cain has written another great book that connects with those in this world that may feel out of place with their feelings and ensures them they are not alone. In a world that seems to value only positivity and optimism, it is refreshing to have a book that celebrates the importance and power of embracing the sadder, bittersweet moments of life without dwelling in them to a fault. Cain informs without preaching and lets her authors explore their bittersweet nature without judgement. The research and commentary felt a little more personal and spiritual than scientific in nature, but she has offered a thorough and knowledgeable look into why longing, bittersweetness, and sadness are not simply emotions to get past as quick as possible in life, but a place to find deep beauty and power within.

Loved this so much I picked it as my book of the month. Exactly what I hoped it would be! This was my first by this author but I will be on the lookout for more!

If you read and loved Susan Cain‘s book Quiet, then you are going to want to read Bittersweet, How Sorrow and Longing Can Make Us Whole.

It’s a wonderful book that is a little memoir, little self-help and I found exploring the ideas of melancholy, sorrow, and longing to be interesting and somewhat poetic. Ideally, this book should be read with a blanket and cup of tea while the rain beats down on the roof and a gentle fire sizzles in the fireplace.

SYNOPSIS:

With 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.

Bittersweetness is a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy when beholding beauty. It recognizes that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. A song in a minor key, an elegiac poem, or even a touching television commercial all can bring us to this sublime, even holy, state of mind—and, ultimately, to greater kinship with our fellow humans.

But bittersweetness is not, as we tend to think, just a momentary feeling or event. It’s also a way of being, a storied heritage. Our artistic and spiritual traditions—amplified by recent scientific and management research—teach us its power.

Cain shows how a bittersweet state of mind is the quiet force that helps us transcend our personal and collective pain. If we don’t acknowledge our own sorrows and longings, she says, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, or neglect. But if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other. And we can learn to transform our own pain into creativity, transcendence, and connection.

At a time of profound discord and personal anxiety, Bittersweet brings us together in deep and unexpected ways.

This is out now!

I’m in the middle on this book. It got a little too deep into self-help and spirituality than I expected. It felt there was more Cain could do to delve deep into this topic without resorting to telling us readers how we can do this or that, such as meditative practices. The book had much more of a memoir aspect than expected as well, explaining how this topic is something she has thought about for much of her life.

Despite the expectations for this book being different than what it actually was, I did not dislike the book. I connected more to the material when Cain discussed her own personal life, and her experience in doing research for the book. She attended several workshop types and a conference, RAADfest on life extension. How longevity and living forever fits in with bittersweet has to do with accepting, or not, the inevitability of death.

I expect this book will be more polarizing and less successful than her book on introversion, but the topics do seem related. And if you enjoyed Quiet, you may find something here to connect to as well.

We’re living, famously, through a time in which we have trouble connecting with others, especially outside our “tribes.” And Keltner’s work shows us that sadness–Sadness, of all things!–has the power to create the “union between souls” that we so desperately lack.

Susan Cain is the author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, a book that felt, in its quiet way, life-changing to me, with its underlying message of it’s ok to be how you are if you’re like this.

I was so looking forward to her newest, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Makes Us Whole (April 5, Random House) although I knew nothing could live up to the impact Quiet had.

Cain was inspired onto the multi-year journey of researching and writing about the specific feeling of sadness crossed with joy by the music of Leonard Cohen, her favorite musician. It takes some effort, but she ultimately describes quite well a feeling that I think can be stubbornly indescribable, that unique mix of sadness mingled with joy that can be so moving — something “rooted in brokenness, but point[ing] at transcendence.”

She finds a lot of ways to encapsulate the feeling of bittersweetness and its iterations, including using the German Sehnsucht, a combination of “yearning” and “an obsession or addiction”, and draws on other people’s experience of bittersweetness, like C.S. Lewis calling it “that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of ‘Kubla Khan,’ the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.”

I was actually a bit hazy — or maybe unconvinced? — about exactly what the feeling was, or the significance of it, because although I love some Cohen songs I don’t have that specific connection as she does. But it’s hard to argue with much of the above, and Cain also links to an accompanying playlist, which solidified the concept for me: “Landslide” was the song that most defined it for me.

Towards the end, she describes Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Spring and Fall,” written “to a young girl who’s upset that the leaves are falling from the trees in ‘Goldengrove'” and that was the icing on the cake. I read that poem for the first time in AP English in high school and I can still remember how it made me feel back then, and still does every time I encounter it. It made me love the entire book and endeavor a little more, because as intangible and strange as this entire concept is, it’s still lovely and affecting.

My issue with it is that aside from capturing these feelings well and validating them — so, showing where they can fit in our lives or in the big scheme of things and what benefit they can have for things like coping, grieving, or just managing bad days — this didn’t feel as actionable or informative as Quiet (unfair to constantly compare them, I know, but the structures and formats are so similar). I think it’s intended only to highlight the benefits of embracing sadness or melancholy, especially considering the particularly American relentlessness of happiness and positivity. (A chapter covers this as well, a topic I’m always interested in since it’s so emotionally and psychologically toxic, but Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided hits it more thoroughly and makes a good companion read.)

Cain braids memoir throughout the cultural and psychological research, including a detailed look at her relationship with her mother and its fracturing, never to be the same throughout the rest of her mother’s life. Her mother now has dementia, and Cain’s description of what’s significant to her — so what remained after the rest of the bitterness fell away — is hauntingly lovely and I think says a lot about what matters to people, ultimately. Her research points are fascinating as always, ranging from the scientific and academic to pop culture, like the story of how the entire script of the Pixar movie Inside Out was retooled to focus on Sadness.

I guess that’s really what this is about emphasizing — that life is never a series of high highs, it’s always tempered and it’s best to get used to that and in fact, to expect it. It’s absolutely worth the read, even if it does feel less innovative or revelatory. There’s a lot of power in these kind of subtle explorations, too.

This. Book. What a captivating book about sorrow and all that comes with it. I will definitely reference this in my college psychology courses that I teach. Everyone needs to read this book!!

This book is by the author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking which was a massive hit after its release in 2012. That book has been one of my favorite nonfiction books for a long time, so when I heard the author was going to be putting out a new book, I knew I had to read it.

This book came about because Susan Cain found herself wondering why she finds so much joy listening to music set in a minor key. It’s actually something her friends teased her about: why are you listening to funeral music? And though they didn’t mean any harm by it, it was one of those sticky questions for the author. She decided she had to know why she responded so strongly to sad music.

This book, Bittersweet, is the product of the research she did to answer that question, and it’s a really interesting blend of psychology and memoir. Throughout the book, she’s looking to demonstrate that the bitter and sweet parts of life are innately intertwined and, though it may be harder to confront the darker aspects of life, they are equal parts of the human experience. And when those two opposing aspects of life unite, they can create some of life’s most meaningful moments.

To show us what she means by this, Susan Cain takes us on a tour of a number of different topics. She examines the feeling of longing and how it has the potential to serve as a spark for future action. She also discusses longing in the context of religion or spirituality - the yearning people feel for knowledge of or closeness to the creator or simply for deeper meaning out of life.

She talks about how depression may kill off creativity, but when dark is mixed with light - creating what she calls the Bittersweet, brains actually make better connections, perhaps once and for all solving the riddle of why artists tend to be on the morose side. She also discusses how our losses transform us, how acceptance of death makes our lives on this earth more profound, but also how trauma has a way of trickling down generations, in social, and possibly even genetic ways.

But she also takes time to focus on American culture - since the author herself is American - which often insists on positivity and draws a clear line between winners and losers. Susan Cain argues that this forced optimism comes at the cost of acknowledging and accepting the inevitable darker aspects of life, and how it’s paradoxically making us less happy.

At the end of the day, she makes a very solid case for the idea that listening to our longing, allowing ourselves to experience both the happy AND the sad enriches our lives, helps us determine what we need, and can answer the question of where we belong.

It’s very fitting that a book about the Bittersweet, titled Bittersweet, could also use that word as an adjective to describe what the feeling of reading the book is like, because though it is a book that shines a spotlight on the sadder parts of life, it is not heavy reading. And though the memoir sections are deeply personal and are occasionally heartbreaking, it’s not depressing in the slightest. It’s actually very empowering.

Throughout the book, the author talks about the loss of her brother and father to complications from COVID-19, her complicated history with her mother, and the trauma nestled in her family history. She fearlessly talks about these extremely hard subjects and by doing so, she’s practicing a lot of what she preaches in the book - she’s very insistent on writing things down and using that as a way to work through hard things. She admits that sharing those stories with us as readers helped her work through them and at the end of the book, you get the sense that she feels so much freer.

This is a very enjoyable, very meaningful read that I think you’ll likely enjoy if you’re a fan of her last book. I don’t think this one is as strong as Quiet, but it does have some crossover, and not just because she mentions her last book a few times in this book, but because at the beginning, she discusses how “Bittersweet” is also a temperament and has a lot in common with the people described as “sensitive” in the last book (referring to external stimuli rather than just emotions). There’s even a little test in the first part of the book that will help you determine where you stand on the Bittersweet scale.

But I think the thing that will determine most of all whether or not you’ll like this book is if you’re interested in that same head scratcher that made the author write this book: have you ever wondered why we like sad things and why they make us feel good, when stewing in other negative emotions, like anger, does NOT have that same effect? Being in the book world and over the years seeing more people than I can count say that books that make them cry immediately become new favorites has always made me wonder something similar. If you’re looking for a deep dive into why those sad songs, movies, shows, books, whatever they may be, make you feel better rather than worse, then I think you’ll enjoy this.

Susan Cain has done for bittersweet people what she has done for introversion: shed a loving light upon it. Unsurprising to find I love this book!

I loved this book and I really needed to hear its message: we can do hard things, and hard things fill our lives with more love and joy. Cain's approach is accessible, much like in her debut book Quiet. Her research melds anecdotes and philosophy, resulting in relatable tales of difficulty, loss, grief, and sadness.