Birthday Book Recs 10/50 : Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain

Thoughts on Books

Dec 17

Birthday Book Recs: 10/50
Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain

You probably know Susan Cain from her megawatt 2012 bestseller Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. I felt like that book was talking right to me (but quietly, of course), and then I read Bittersweet, Cain’s 2022 reflection on the symbiotic emotions of sorrow/longing and beauty/joy — you can’t have one without the other — and knew that she was still talking to me. (I suppose I can share her with other readers…) Some of us are more drawn to the melancholy, and it’s not because we’re unhappy or morose or dissatisfied — I think it’s just that we have an acute recognition that sustained and unwavering “toxic positivity” sort of cheapens the beauty of joy.

Bittersweet wasn’t as well-received as Quiet and has sometimes been criticized for Cain’s tendency to relate and tie together disparate facts and anecdotes as well as her mash-up of memoir, psychology, history, and maybe even a tinge of that dreaded “self-help.” Oh well. That tying together of disparate qualities is kind of how I write, so sign me up for the great honor of one day potentially being criticized in print so that I can dive back into Bittersweet to help me shake it off.

{While I was pulling out Bittersweet, I found a copy of the poem Homesick by Marge Piercy sandwiched between two books here. This used to be taped above my desk in the basement of our old house, where I tried — with modest success — to carve out some space during covid. Anyway, I had ripped this out of a book that was housed in Goodnow Library’s makerspace, probably while I was cooking up some project with @bethanyschlegel…I bet it was for @bookmarked01776, which still lives on here on Instagram btw! Anyway, I remember thinking: Here’s inspo….rrrrrip. And lest you think I’m a book-destroyer, this was from a stash of books that had been weeded from circulation and was meant to be used for art projects or whatever, ok?!}

{Bethany: bookMARKED was a damn good project. xo}