September’s Recommended Reading: Bittersweet

September’s Recommended Reading is “Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole” by Susan Cain.

I was really excited to read this because I loved Susan Cain’s previous book “Quiet” which was about the power of introverts. She made me feel really seen in that book, and she did it again with this new one. 

To quote her: “This book is about the melancholic direction, which I call the “bittersweet”: 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. The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. “Days of honey, days of onion,” as an Arabic proverb puts it.” I love that! 

I feel like fall is a bittersweet time of year, so it seemed like the perfect time to share the book with you. In the book, you can take a quiz to see how much you tend toward bittersweetness. It came as no surprise to me that I scored quite highly on this quiz which, in her words, means that I'm a "true connoisseur of the place where light and dark meet." And I loved her deep dive into what this means.

I also really loved how she delved into her difficult relationship with her mother and how grief ties into that. She talks about having an emotionally abusive mother throughout her life and how through much of her life that relationship was estranged. Now her mother is in her eighties and lives with Alzheimer's disease, which complicated their relationship even more. Having an estranged relationship with a living family member is a specific kind of grief that we don't talk about as often as other kinds of grief. If you share this experience, I think this book will help you feel less alone and more understood. Grief, itself, can be bittersweet, and she explores that idea beautifully.

Since reading this book, I find myself noticing even more where the bitter and sweet meet and how they make my life richer and more meaningful.