martatriestoread 's review for:

Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain

3.0

---

"Everything is broken; everything is beautiful; everything, including love."


Bittersweet by Susan Cain 3.5/5
--soulful and truly moving at times, yet missing some foundation and direction

Short book description: Susan Cain 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.

.
After standing in my bookshelf for quite a while, I have decided to give this book a go.

Susan Cain kicks off the concept of the book by asking the question: “Why do we feel drawn to sad and haunting music?".
Moving out of this question, Susan draws in various side topics, like the longing that prompts mysticism (Kabbalah and Sufism), loving-kindness meditation, an American culture of positivity that demands “effortless perfection,” ways the business world could cultivate empathy, and how knowledge of death makes life precious.
The book focuses on a simple message: Tears are part of life. Take the good with the bad and take time to be sad because nobody is truly happy ALL of the time.

Bittersweet was to me a pleasant surprise, yet I'm fully aware it will resonate very differently with everyone that reads it.
I was quite surprised at how moving and profound this book managed to be in certain parts. There were many places in the book where I was filled with longing in my heart and tears in my eyes. As someone who is a true romantic with a very intense journey through trauma, I related heavily to the emotions and feelings this book invokes within your soul. The material on mortality, impermanence, and grief was the most thought-provoking for me.
Yet I can't fail to feel that, at times, the message got a bit lost, and even tho this book is within the non-fiction genre, its premise doesn't seem to well-founded on scientific facts or research and is based only on personal experience.
Some particular chapters felt a bit non-founded and not well tied into the book's core premise. Sometimes it was hard to keep track of the larger story while navigating all the smaller stories interwoven here and there. The book can be somewhat repetitive as she makes again and again the point that bittersweet gives meaning, creativity, love and union with others to our existence.

It was an easy and fast read and I was truly touched in certain moments, yet I was left with some mixed emotions concerning certain chapters and the overall experience.