Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole is a book that can be challenging to categorize. For much of the first chapter, the book reads as a memoir in which Susan Cain narrates the relationship she had with her mother during her childhood into her young adulthood. She also discusses her love of the musician and writer Leonard Cohen and other sad music, and she offers many self-reflections throughout the entirety of the book. She reveals to the reader that she lost both her older brother and her father to COVID in the same year, and her presence in the book is generally consistent. Even as she interviews various experts in fields ranging from psychology to neuroscience to business management, her reflections on the interviews suggest that this is also a personal work for her.

One could also categorize this book as self-help, as ultimately Cain’s purpose is to offer readers insights that she has gained from probing into the mysteries of melancholy. She wants to teach readers How to Respond to Pain. She often uses the second-person, direct address to mimic a dialogue with the reader and guide them into their own state of self-reflection. It is in this way the book can be considered self-help, even though it does not offer much in the way of step-by-step directions or more practical how-to advice. This is by design, as Cain realizes that much of what she discusses, including how to cope with death, and how best to respond to suffering, ultimately have no singular, one-size-fits-all answer. Ostensibly, Cain takes the reader along on a journey of discovery.

Furthermore, Cain at times uses various rhetorical tactics to persuade the reader to her point of view. In this way, the book is also an argumentative research essay. Cain frequently employs all three rhetorical appeals (logos, ethos, pathos), and the book has a central thesis that Cain attempts to support by using the research she has collected from a broad range of sources. Cain discusses the views of famous authors, poets, and songwriters, including Leonard Cohen, C. S. Lewis, Frederico Garcia Lorca, J. R. R. Tolkien, Maya Angelou, and the poet Rumi. Cain also explores various aspects of religious beliefs found in Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sufism. She interviews eminent people in the field of neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary psychology, and she spends a few pages discussing the melancholic personality of Charles Darwin. In pulling from such a wide array of source material, Cain hopes to fortify her main argument and persuade the reader to invest more in their own states of melancholy.

Finally, this is Cain’s second book, and it picks up from where the first book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, leaves off. In that book, as well as in this one, Cain challenges conventional wisdom and presents a counter-intuitive approach to a subject. While the ideas of both books are not entirely novel, they are insightful because they argue against prevailing opinion and conventional cultural norms.