Cain utilizes an engaging blend of interviews, research, firsthand accounts, and biographical anecdotes to explore the many beneficial aspects of appreciating this mindset ... Timely in its focus, this latest work by Cain delivers an eloquent and compelling case supporting the transformative possibilities of embracing sorrow. Highly recommended.
On one of the first pages Cain writes, 'I didn’t fact-check the stories people told me about themselves, but included only those I believed to be true.' After that, it’s difficult to know how seriously to take this book as a document of scholarship or reportage ... But as a package to be sold, Bittersweet has it all: a catchy word, a culture that doesn’t appreciate the power of that word and a call to action for individuals and businesses who can better meet their goals by embracing the word ... Perhaps this is why I found the premise of Bittersweet, and most of the anecdotes and evidence in the book, obvious. If you’ve attended religious worship or even a yoga class or have spent any time in the last two years reflecting on the lessons the pandemic has forced upon us, you might feel the same ... you’d have to be pretty disengaged from modern discourse to have no exposure to the idea that unexpressed and unexamined sadness can poison mental health ... But a big feature of this book is that it seems disconnected from the contemporary realities of our culture ... Cain completely misses the opportunity to connect the lessons of her research to this global catastrophe...Even as she makes these revelations, she bypasses the opportunity to connect the dots of her own experiences, her research and the losses her family suffered with the wreckage wrought by Covid. Cain is entitled to process her own grief privately, but she has chosen to write a book filled with personal anecdotes and family stories. It suffers as a result of her selective restraint ... There are other examples that make Cain seem out of touch...As a general matter, Cain’s heavy reliance on anecdotes and studies drawn from Ivy League (plus Stanford!) sources on the Ted Talk circuit (I never realized how much those Venn diagram circles overlapped until I read this book) renders a very narrow perspective, since the life experience and opinions of the viral elite is largely limited to those of extreme privilege ... Cain writes most poignantly (though, ironically, quite stoically) of her own pivotal moments — including, at the end of the book, the process of letting the demise of her legal career give way to her dream of becoming a writer, and of listening to sad music as a balm for the pain of a Covid goodbye said over the phone to a dying parent. Some sweetness to help transcend the bitter.
While this argument is moving, this book misses some crucial components of the conversation, diluting her claims in the process ... This hodge-podge, though, of analytical paths keeps the book from being especially focused. Jumping from religious theory to social research to personal narrative and back again makes the book’s direction feel cyclical rather than forward-facing. The flowery, mystical language of religious and spiritual dogma stands in sharp contrast against the practical descriptions of leadership and communication development in the workplace, and it makes both of them harder to take seriously. All the thought avenues Cain explores are worth discussion, but in trying to do it at once, she risks drowning the most important ideas — and the reader — in a sea of theory, research, and memoir ... The manner in which Cain goes about presenting this mass of material to her reader, though, is commendable. The reading experience is both painful and cathartic as Cain, with a gentle hand, leads her readers down the intimidating path of more deeply considering their own emotional tendencies and well-being. The language is rarely convoluted or condescending, and Cain uses largely accessible research to support her ideas ... This book does a fabulous job of helping even the most unemotional reader connect the ideas of melancholy to the context of their own life ... The pain-to-creativity pipeline is well-documented; negative emotions often inspire great art. But Cain fails to acknowledge that sometimes pain, or more specifically, trauma are imposed upon people in sustained and unbearable ways ... Ultimately, Bittersweet achieves Cain’s goal: The reading experience forces her audience to consider that perhaps sorrow does serve a purpose, and that we should allow one another to welcome our negative emotions without judgment. The book is well-researched, well-written, and a necessary first step into an important conversation, but it is incomplete. It fails to acknowledge the way that social and economic forces often keep people in situations that make transforming past pain into creativity especially difficult. Sorrow cannot build bridges when it is intentionally and systematically perpetuated as a tool for subjugation and oppression.
