Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

by Susan Cain

The bittersweet is about the desire for communion, the wish to go home.

It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.

If we don’t transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect.

This idea—of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love—is the heart of this book.

“Longing is different from craving,” he explains. “It’s the craving of the soul. You want to go home. In our culture it’s confused with depression. And it’s not. There’s a saying in Sufism: ‘Sufism was at first heartache. Only later, it became something to write about.’