#1 New York Times best-selling author Susan Cain shares how a bittersweet, melancholic outlook makes emotional room for beauty, creativity, and love.
Debbie Millman:
If we think more positively about being an introvert today than we did 10 years ago, Susan Cain is the reason why. Her 2012 book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, made the case that our culture gets introverts all wrong and often undervalues them. In 2016, she followed up with the book Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts. Now, she’s investigating another underappreciated aspect of the human experience. Her latest book is titled Bittersweet: How Longing and Sorrow Make Us Whole. He or she argues that a bittersweet melancholic outlook makes emotional room for beauty, creativity, and love. And we’re going to talk all about that today. Susan Cain, welcome to Design Matters.
Susan Cain:
Thank you so much, Debbie. I am your fan, and it is so great to be here with you.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you. Susan, I want to know if it’s true that there’s never been a day in your adult life that you haven’t had some dark chocolate.
Susan Cain:
It’s so true. And I would even modify it to say that there’s never been a day when I haven’t had too much dark chocolate.
Debbie Millman:
Good for you. Now, why dark chocolate versus milk or white?
Susan Cain:
I just always really… Long before I ever knew I was going to write a book called Bittersweet, from the time I was a kid, my favorite chocolate was bittersweet chocolate. And now that I’m adult, I also know that it’s better for you. So if I’m going to have this chocolate addiction, it might as well be the kind that’s good for you.
Debbie Millman:
And I understand you’re not too picky about the kind of dark chocolate. In fact, you prefer the little semi-sweet chocolate chips that you can put in yogurt.
Susan Cain:
Well, I do do that. Yeah, but I mean, I like it all. I definitely notice if it’s specially good chocolate. I just don’t pay that much attention. It’s more like the chocolate fix. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You grew up in Lawrence on Long Island, the youngest of three children, and your grandfather was a rabbi who lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn. And you’ve said, that was your favorite place in the world. How come?
Susan Cain:
Oh, my gosh. Yeah, it really was my favorite place. And he was one of my favorite people in the world. I mean, the apartment itself was like the proverbial place, like you step across the doorway and you’re suddenly in another realm. You know?
Debbie Millman:
Mm-hmm.
Susan Cain:
If it were the site of a children’s movie, it would’ve been the place from which the adventures began, but they were adventures of the mind. It was this place where every surface was filled with stacks of books, the walls were lined with books. His life was in books. He would spend all his time sitting on the sofa and reading and then crafting these sermons that were based on it. He just had this very magical, gentle, loving, wise presence. And the whole place was imbued with that. We used to go and visit. My mother and I would go and visit him there all the time. They would be talking their adult talk, and I would just comb through the bookshelves. It wasn’t even the books themselves; it was like some essence that I was absorbing. It was like what love looked like for me or one aspect of it. And also what ambition looked like in a way because I wanted to grow up and be part of that world of books in which he lived and which he revered so much.
Debbie Millman:
Did he live in Borough Park?
Susan Cain:
Yes, he did. He did.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. My grandparents lived there as well. I come from a very Orthodox Jewish family, and my grandmother and grandfather lived there. That’s where we went to synagogue and spent a lot of time.
Susan Cain:
Oh, you’re kidding.
Debbie Millman:
No, I’m not.
Susan Cain:
Which synagogue was it? I wonder if it was the same one.
Debbie Millman:
Actually, I don’t know. My father passed away many years ago, and he sort of broke away from the religion as a young adult. We ended up going to a more reform synagogue in Howard Beach, Queens where we ended up moving after Brooklyn.
Susan Cain:
Mm-hmm. Right.
Debbie Millman:
So I was only about two or three years old when we lived in Brooklyn and then moved to Howard Beach, Queens.
Susan Cain:
Well, I bet you your grandparents went to my grandfather’s synagogue.
Debbie Millman:
I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t.
Susan Cain:
I would bet a dollar on it.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I bet. I remember going with my grandmother, sitting in a separate place from the men, wearing plastic shoes on Yom Kippur, the whole thing.
Susan Cain:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Okay, so now I’ll go back to my official questions.
Susan Cain:
Okay.
Debbie Millman:
Susan, I read that you went to the library every Friday and came home with a teetering stack of books. What were your favorites at that time?
Susan Cain:
Oh gosh, so many different books. I guess there were two genres especially that I loved. One was the fantasy genre, so like E. Nesbit and Edward Eager and all those writers. But also, my family went every summer. My father was a huge anglophile and bibliophile. So we went every summer to London and we would go with his empty suitcase, which we would then-
Debbie Millman:
Fill.
Susan Cain:
… fill with books. Yeah, because there was no Amazon in those days.
Debbie Millman:
Right.
Susan Cain:
And England just had all these great books that you couldn’t get in the US, especially for kids. So there are all these boarding school stories of the kind in which Harry Potter was kind of modeled.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Susan Cain:
So I grew up reading all those stories.
Debbie Millman:
As you were growing up, I understand you spent countless afternoons writing stories. You called the area under your family’s card table, your workshop, and curled up there producing magazines, comprised of loose leaf papers stapled together. And is it true that you sold subscriptions to your family members to the magazines?
Susan Cain:
Yeah, it is true.
Debbie Millman:
I love that.
Susan Cain:
There were two magazines. One was called Rags and one was called Rabbit. I don’t know why, but yeah, I had a lot of willing buyers among the extended family.
Debbie Millman:
It’s so interesting. I had a best friend, her name was Debbie also. We made a magazine also that we wrote and drew ourselves. And I still think that this is one of my best names ever. We called our magazine Debutante [inaudible 00:06:30] our names.
Susan Cain:
Oh, that’s so clever.
Debbie Millman:
Unfortunately, neither of us have that copy. We reconnected on Facebook years and years and years ago. But the first thing we tried to figure out was who got the magazine, and neither one of us did.
Susan Cain:
You’re reminding me that I had a friend named Michelle in fourth grade. I used to go to Michelle’s house and we would sit at this little table in her room and write plays. We weren’t writing them together. We were more like writing them side by side, but those are some of my happiest memories.
Debbie Millman:
Actually, when I was doing my research, I read that you guys would sit side by side and then read aloud to each other, read the plays out loud to each other.
Susan Cain:
Oh, wow. First of all, I can’t even imagine what this research is that you did. I’m so impressed because I don’t remember that I’ve ever even talked about that, about writing those plays with Michelle.
Debbie Millman:
Were you envisioning at that point? Was that when you first thought you might want to be a writer?
Susan Cain:
Oh, I wanted to be a writer from the time I was four years old. I was in love with books from the very beginning. My siblings were much older, and my whole family, they’re all readers. So I was like the little kid growing up in a family of much older people where everybody’s thing was books. So I grew up with that ambition. So yeah, I was writing those little stapled together stories from the time I was very, very small.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve talked about how much your mother encouraged your creativity at that time in your life and have said that she never told you that you should be outside more or do more regular kid stuff or daydream less or socialize more. You’ve stated that she understood that you had plenty of friends to play with, but recognized that one of your best friends was your very own self. And I was wondering, did you prefer to play on your own or was it something that you just like to do both of?
Susan Cain:
It was really both. I don’t know. Maybe if I had always been off on my own, maybe she wouldn’t have been quite as supportive. She might have been more worried about it or something like that. But no, I always had a lot of friends and always loved playing with my friends. It was very devoted. My close friends, there’s nothing like, I think, girlhood friendships. They’re just the best and the most fun and the most intense. Yeah, I had all of that, but also loved to spend all this time reading and daydreaming. And that aspect of life was just very familiar to her because she had grown up with this father who was so immersed both in his community but also in this life of the mind. So I guess that juxtaposition was just natural to the way she had always lived.
Debbie Millman:
One thing that I was really compelled by as I was doing my research was how you’ve written about how on both your mother’s side of the family and your father’s side of the family, you lost most of your relatives in the Holocaust, and it gave you the sense as you were growing up that something like this could happen at any moment. This motivated your subsequent research into what’s referred to as inherited grief, which I was really, really fascinated by. Can you talk a little bit about what inherited grief is and some of the research and some of the things that you discovered doing that research?
Susan Cain:
Yeah. I mean, inherited grief is the idea that the grief or the trauma that occurs to generation A can be inherited by the descendants of generation A. It can be inherited in generations B, C, D, E, F and all the way down. I think people have always had a sense that that might be true, but would assume that that would’ve happened primarily or solely through family traditions, cultural traditions, whatever. But what’s really fascinating is this whole new line of research that started actually with Holocaust survivors, but has since branched out beyond that. That has found that there seem to be epigenetic changes that occur when a profound life event happens that change the very makeup of our DNA in such a way that it can be passed to the descendants, whether or not those descendants have ever known the actual people who withstood those events. And it’s very interesting, if you look among Jews in general, there does seem to be this predisposition to anxiety. Where does that come from? Does that come from… Just that we-
Debbie Millman:
We are not alone.
Susan Cain:
Yeah. Is it like we teach it to each other, something bad could happen at any moment? Maybe it’s that, but it also may be something that really is encoded in us.
Debbie Millman:
I just think it’s so interesting that trauma actually has the ability to then impact our evolution if it’s changing our DNA.
Susan Cain:
I know. It’s kind of a remarkable finding. I mean, I should say, these studies are still pretty young and they’re somewhat controversial, but there’s enough of them that are starting to accumulate now that I would say the field is less controversial than it was when it first emerged. But yeah, there is a woman named Rachel Yehuda at Columbia who pioneered this work and continues to do more and more of it. And it’s really fascinating.
Debbie Millman:
You write about Rachel specifically in your book, and I ended up going into a rabbit hole of her research as well, which is just incredibly fascinating in terms of understanding how important it is to get help after trauma and how trauma not only then impacts you, but really whoever you’re around and whoever you’re with and potentially whoever you bring into the world.
Susan Cain:
Yeah. No, there’s something very empowering about knowing that. And I actually discovered this… Well, I mean, I guess I always knew about this aspect of my life, but I did have a moment… When I was researching the book, I went to this conference for bereavement counselors. I’m not a bereavement counselor myself. I was just there as part of my book research. But the workshop was led by this incredible guy named Dr. Simcha Raphael, and he led us through an exercise where at first we just had to tell the group about a loss that we had gone through in our lives. And I talked about a particular loss and I found myself in floods of tears, which I hadn’t expected.
As we began the exercise, I was feeling actually quite kind of detached in a matter of fact. And so it really took me by surprise that as I started to talk, these tears came, and the tears were not unfamiliar to me. It was like, I had known them before, I had experienced these tears before. And it was actually Simcha who said to me that there was something about the nature of the tears that they seem to be not only my own tears. They seem to be other people’s tears too-
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Susan Cain:
… that they seem to be like tears of parents or ancestors that I was carrying with me. And that was, on the one hand, maybe a kind of woo-woo thing to say, but on the other hand, there was something about it that really resonated. And I was reminded of all my life from the time I was very young. Like when I was in sleep-away camp, for example, and I had kind of liked camp and kind of really didn’t, I was pretty ambivalent about it, and yet on the last day of camp, when I was a little kid, I was in floods of tears about leaving camp. There was always something about endings and goodbyes that I took much harder than the situation seemed to warrant. And it felt like there was some ancient grief that I was locking into. That whole experience got me down this pathway of investigating this idea of inherited grief.
Debbie Millman:
I know you went to Princeton University.
Susan Cain:
Mm-hmm.
Debbie Millman:
You graduated with a degree in English. I also graduated with a degree in English, but from SUNY Albany. And you graduated after completing a 91-page long senior thesis titled A Study of T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis. And I’m wondering why you chose those writers and artists.
Susan Cain:
Oh my, first of all, can I just exclaim over the level of research you do for your podcasts? It’s amazing. I haven’t thought about that senior thesis in 30 years, and certainly no one has asked me about it.
Debbie Millman:
Really?
Susan Cain:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, my God. I love T.S. Eliot. I was so excited to ask you about it.
Susan Cain:
Wow. Okay. So I wrote that… As I say, I haven’t thought about it in decades, but I’m pretty sure the subtitle of that thesis was a study of anti-democratic literature between the world wars. So it’s really actually a follow-on of everything we were just talking about, I think, because I emerged from this family where so much of our destiny was shaped by those wars. I was just always really fascinated by what could have possibly caused all of that to happen. So yeah, I was really interested in the literature of that period during that lull between the wars when there was even that time during the ’20s where it seemed like everything was happy and good and then turned very dark. So I’ve always been trying to figure that out.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, that’s so interesting because in terms of that happy and dark, you also talked about effortless perfection and how everybody at Princeton appeared extremely shiny and in control and seemed they were supposed to be in life and as if they had already arrived sort of fully formed.
Susan Cain:
Yeah, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And you described this as effortless perfection. I’m wondering, if that was going on at Princeton then, it seems that the entirety of social media is experiencing that now. There’s the pressure that people seem to have to be effortlessly adept is extraordinary. And it’s a complete mismatch to what we truly feel and experience, but we can’t reveal that. How are you seeing what you were experiencing at Princeton then to what’s happening in this sort of larger context of what’s happening, I guess, mostly online now?
Susan Cain:
Well, I mean that term of effortless perfection didn’t actually exist back when I was at Princeton. I just was living it, I think. And what happened is, I went back 30 years later with a writer’s notebook, which is the most amazing gift because it allows you to just enter into conversations with total strangers really and talk about the real stuff. And so I just started asking these students what their lives were really like. And they were the ones who told me about this term effortless perfection, which is apparently a term at Princeton, at many other college campuses, because this generation has felt the need to invent this term to describe what it is they’re experiencing. It basically means this pressure to be perfectly thin, perfectly beautiful, perfectly athletic, perfectly academic, perfectly ambitious, perfectly social, and to do it all and to appear to be doing all of that effortlessly.
I do think social media has enhanced all of these pressures, but they’re, in certain ways, not so different from what I had experienced all those years ago. I think this has been something that’s been deep in our culture for a long time. Social media, just because it’s so performative by its nature, just enhances, but it enhances what had already been there.
Debbie Millman:
I want to share a really, really bittersweet story with you about something that I did. I think I was in ninth grade. I just remembered this for the first time.
Susan Cain:
Ah.
Debbie Millman:
I have crush on a boy named Robert, and Robert had a crush on a girl named Lorraine. And I wanted Robert to think that I was perfect. I got a t-shirt, my favorite t-shirt, and I got those press-on letters.
Susan Cain:
Oh yeah, those iron-ons.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Those iron-on letters, and I measured really carefully, and I ironed on the word perfect-
Susan Cain:
Oh, my gosh.
Debbie Millman:
… on a t-shirt and went to school with it on. And people were looking at me rather bizarrely, I remember that, like, “Whoa.” But what I didn’t realize as I measured, to make sure it was perfectly placed, was that the P and the T ended up under my arms and got all crinkled by my perspiration over the course of the day. And so all you saw was erfec with the P and the T sort of bunched up in my armpits essentially. I just remember that, I’m like, “Oh my God, this attempt to have seemed perfect which showed how imperfect I really, really was.”
Susan Cain:
I can’t get over that story. It’s like, if you had invented that story for a children’s book, it would feel like too neat to be true. But I do think you should write that one up.
Debbie Millman:
I probably will now that it’s come flooded back to me. Oh, my God. In any case, from Princeton, you went to Harvard and you went to Harvard Law. You have your JD. You were a practicing lawyer for a long time. Was that effortless perfection, even though we didn’t know the term at that point, do you think that that was sort of fueling your decision to pursue this sort of very respectable, very prestigious type of career?
Susan Cain:
No, I actually really don’t. There were two things that happened. One is that I took a bunch of classes at Princeton in creative writing, but they were all in fiction. And I didn’t understand at the time really that there was a thing of creative nonfiction. I just didn’t know even though I realized in retrospect there was a class there in that, but somehow that escaped me.
So anyway, I was doing these fiction classes and it just really wasn’t my thing. And so I thought, “Oh, well, all those youthful dreams that I always had about being a writer, those were just like kid dreams. They weren’t real. That’s not what I’m going to do.” And at the same time, my father pulled me aside and said, “All those writer dreams that you’ve had, that’s really great when you’re young. But when you can’t support yourself when you’re 30 and you can’t pay the rent, it’s not really so romantic then. So you should do something where you can support yourself.” Although I resisted that advice at the time he gave it to me, it also sunk in and I did want to be able to be able to take care of myself. So it was just this practical decision that I made. That’s really what it was.
But then, I got to law school. And because most of the people who were at law school were people who had majored in politics or government or whatever, because I was so not meant for that place in the first place, I actually liked it more than most people did. Most people really gritted their teeth through it. I found it fascinating because it just felt to me like it was like being in another country, I’ve said before. And I just found it all fascinating. So for a while, I quite enjoyed the whole thing.
Debbie Millman:
Were you still keeping your diaries at that point? I know that you had started writing diaries from a very, very early age. It was part of what created a bit of a rift between you and your mom.
Susan Cain:
Yeah. I kept these very intense diaries all the way through high school and college. And I kept them in this red backpack with a little combination lock on them. And I would carry that backpack with me from dorm room to dorm room, to apartment building, to wherever I was living. And I do remember being in law school and carrying that backpack with me on my summer job things. But at some point I lost the backpack. Strange, like it’s floating around somewhere in the world.
Debbie Millman:
Somewhere in the world. I’ve read about this, and when I was reading about it, I literally gasped. It’s one thing to have a parent read your diaries as your mom did when you were younger, but quite another to know that it’s somewhere out in the world.
Susan Cain:
I know.
Debbie Millman:
I feel like every time you talk about it, I’m hoping that somewhere, somehow, someone will hear this and see a red backpack at a flea market and buy it and send it back to you. That is my hope.
Susan Cain:
That would be so awesome. I have to say, my best friend from college heard me… We were talking about some college stuff. She really wants me to write a memoir from those years. And I’m like, “I can’t do it unless I find the diaries,” because I don’t think I remember enough for a whole memoir, but I have books and books in there, somewhere floating around the world. But it is a curious thing. I lost those diaries twice because in one of those summer dorm room things, I left the diaries behind and then got a phone call from whom I had been subletting. And she said, “You’ve left this backpack full of diaries.” And so I came and got them, and then I lost them again a year later. So I don’t know, I am an extremely forgetful person by nature. I just am. I don’t know if it’s that or if it’s some subconscious thing of having wanted to lose them. Who can say?
Debbie Millman:
After you graduated from Harvard, you went to work at a firm called Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton.
Susan Cain:
Steen & Hamilton. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Steen & Hamilton. Steen & Hamilton, which is described as an international white-shoe law firm, has over 1,200 lawyers worldwide. You’ve since said that you were not a very natural lawyer in a million different ways, but you were on the partner track and very committed to that track. How did you envision your life at that point?
Susan Cain:
Well, I mean, this was before I had kids, which made it easier. I really loved it at the beginning. The firm I was at, Cleary… All the firms have a slightly different personality to them, and Cleary had a kind of intellectual vibe and an international vibe. And I just liked it. I enjoyed it. I really liked my colleagues. I thought it was kind of interesting. I couldn’t quite believe that I was able to manage in this world of high finance, which was so foreign to me. I didn’t grow up in that kind of family. I didn’t know the difference between a stock and a bond when I first started practicing. It was all so bizarre to me really. So I got a huge kick out of it at the beginning.
But then, it’s actually a very interesting lesson. Because this was a 24/7 type of existence, so when you’re absorbed into a social world 24/7, it really does become a kind of hermetically sealed container. And it’s very hard to imagine what your life could be like outside of that. Even though as the years went on I was starting to feel like completely overworked and this wasn’t really the right fit for me, I still was within that container and envisioning a life of being a partner with these colleagues who I really liked. And I had a dream, I wrote about this in the book. I had this dream of being able to move into a red brick townhouse in West Village, in Greenwich Village in Manhattan, which is this lovely neighborhood.
Debbie Millman:
Best neighborhood in the world.
Susan Cain:
It is the best neighborhood in the world. It really is. And I did end up moving there. I just couldn’t afford the townhouse, but I did end up getting an apartment there after leaving the law.
Debbie Millman:
When one of your senior partners let you know that you are not going to make partner, you burst into tears and immediately took a leave of absence from the firm. One thing I wasn’t clear about, did you know if he meant you weren’t going to make partner at that specific time or that you were never going to make partner?
Susan Cain:
I had no idea. I wasn’t clear either. I’m still not clear to this day, but I do know that I had simultaneously the sense of like, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened and this is the best thing that’s ever happened. And while I was crying, I was in the mode of, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened. But I left, two hours later, I was bicycle riding around Central Park, just in a loop around the park going nowhere. But just the fact that it could be two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon or whatever day it was and I was free to just wander around the city like that was the most amazing thing. Yeah. And then literally that very night, I started writing again. And it was the first time I had done that in so many years.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I read that one week later, you signed up for a creative non-fiction class at NYU. And at that moment, you said you had a complete feeling of certainty that this was what you were going to be doing and had zero expectation that you would make a living out of it.
Susan Cain:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
But you were then committed. That was when you just decided to accept that this was what you wanted to do.
Susan Cain:
Yeah. It wasn’t even accepting it. It was like, there was no choice. It was so clear. It was like, “This is it. This is what I’ve always wanted. This is what I…” And especially because now I had found this genre of nonfiction. Because as I said, when I had been in college, I had been experimenting with fiction and that didn’t work. But it was like, now I’d found nonfiction and I realized, “Oh, this was the thing I needed all along.” It wasn’t only that I didn’t expect to make a living at it, I told myself that the goal was to try to publish something by the time I was 75, because I didn’t know what was involved in getting published, I didn’t know if it such a thing could be possible. I had just grown up with this idea of, to publish a book, it was like scaling Mount Olympus.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Susan Cain:
So do you know if you’ll actually be able to scale Mount Olympus before you’re 75? No, you do not. So that’s how it was to me. But I knew that I wanted to center my life around that.
Debbie Millman:
Shortly after you left your job, you also ended a seven-year relationship that you also had felt always was sort of wrong.
Susan Cain:
Mm-hmm.
Debbie Millman:
As you’ve put it, so there you were in your early 30s, you had no career, no love, no place to live, and your next move, I love this because I so relate, your next move was to immediately fall into a relationship with a handsome musician who despite you stating was the wrong guy for a variety of reasons, your feelings for him developed into a crazy obsession, the likes of which you have never experienced before or since. No matter what you did, you couldn’t seem to escape it. Been there, done that, know it. So glad that’s behind me. Do you have a sense of why this happened at the time?
Susan Cain:
Oh yeah, very much so. I mean I had basically spent the prior 10 years in the wrong relationship and in the wrong career. And now I was suddenly in this state that I called free fall, but it wasn’t an accident that this was the particular person who I fell in love with. What actually happened is, I had this very indulgent friend, Naomi, who would listen to me tell stories about this guy on endless repeat. And Naomi one day said to me, “If you are this obsessed with him, it’s because he represents something. He represents something that you’re longing for. And so what is it that you’re longing for?”
The minute she said it, the moment she said it, it was so clear to me that he represented this beautiful world of art and literature that I had wanted to be part of from the very beginning and had not thought I could belong to somehow or not allowed myself access to or something like that. As soon as I understood that, the obsession with him completely melted away and I was just able to focus on the writing itself, which was the thing. I mean, he was a lovely person. He had all kinds of qualities to justify loving him, but the obsession part, that was all gone. Whenever you’re feeling an emotion that’s beyond all reason, there’s a reason.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Susan, that’s my favorite line in the book. You are this hooked because he represents something you’re longing for. And how often do we sort of transfer and project these longings on someone as opposed to something that we should be doing or want to be feeling or need to be feeling that we just can’t seem to get ourselves to feel. And it’s really the moment I was so looking forward to talking to you about because I know I’ve been through it, I know so many people have been through these experiences where this sort of obsession takes over our psyche. And we don’t really know why because we know it’s not the person. I’ve had that experience with siblings. I’ve had this experience with significant others where the anger, the sadness or the sorrows somehow seem so much bigger than it is because it’s really not about that at all.
Susan Cain:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I know. And when you’re in the throes of it, it’s very hard to see that. It’s actually, I think, probably less common to have a kind of epiphany moment the way I did, that all she had to do was ask that one question and I was like, “Oh, okay. The skies have parted and now I see.” More often, we probably come to it more gradually or in retrospect.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I think that’s something that’s actually going to help people in reading Bittersweet because I had an experience recently where I was just weeping over something that had happened with my brother. I was literally all day long weeping, weeping on the street, weeping in the house, weeping in the studio. And all of a sudden, because I had just read that, I thought, “This isn’t about that at all. This is something much, much deeper.” And then I was able to really look at it in a way that I hadn’t before.
Susan Cain:
Oh wow.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I want to talk about longing and bittersweet in a moment, but I just feel like it’s really important to at least acknowledge what happened right before Bittersweet or in the years before Bittersweet, which is when that obsession fell away and you started writing for real, which really ultimately led you to writing Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, which is an idea you had in the beginning of the 2000s and then ultimately published in 2012.
At the time you were writing Quiet, you thought that you were working on a highly idiosyncratic project and you’d be lucky to get a book deal and sell a few copies, but that’s not what happened at all. Your agent approached several publishers that was on auction, a bidding war. Penguin Random House emerged the winner. It took you seven years to write Quiet. I want to make sure I have this right. Is it true that your editor read the first draft, told you it was terrible, rejected it outright, and then told you to start over from scratch?
Susan Cain:
Yeah, it is true. I mean, she said it more nicely than maybe that summary makes it sound like.
Debbie Millman:
Okay.
Susan Cain:
She was nice about it.
Debbie Millman:
But she still said the word like, “No.”
Susan Cain:
Yeah. I remember going to her office and sitting at her desk and she said, “Yeah, I want you to start over. Just start over, start from scratch, and we’re going to give you all the time that you need to do this.”
Debbie Millman:
Wow, that’s incredible. I have to tell you that I told my editor that I needed more time and she was like, “No.”
Susan Cain:
I know. Well, it’s funny that you say that because I was actually so elated when she did that because I knew I needed so much more time. I totally knew it. I had never published a word in my life. I had no idea how to write a book, and I knew I couldn’t do it in the short amount of time that publishing contracts usually give you. So I was just thrilled that I had all that free rein.
Debbie Millman:
Well, it was worth it, worth the wait. Quiet was finally released in 2012. It became a pretty instant success. It’s now sold over four million copies worldwide. It’s been translated into more than 40 languages. It spent more than seven years on The New York Times Best Seller list. Your TED Talk on the power of introverts has been viewed over 40 million times. And as importantly as all of those markers of success, I think that it’s really clear in our culture today that Quiet inspired a cultural reconsideration about what it means to be an introvert. Did you have any sense or intuition at all that that groundswell was going to occur and that way in which we think about quieter people was going to be so profound and meaningful to so many people?
Susan Cain:
I guess the glimmerings of it started to happen from the time that I first sold the book and there was that bidding war that you talked about. At that bidding war, that consisted of me going around to meet with all the different publishers who were bidding. So I was basically going from one meeting to the next. Each one filled with people saying, “Oh, this book is about me. I’ve never said this out loud before, but this is about me.” So I started to hear things like that over and over and over again. So you start to kind of get a glimmer, but I think you never believe something like that until it actually happens.
Also, if I showed to you, it wasn’t only that one time when my editor pulled me in and said start from scratch, but there was another editor who was involved and he wrote me a two-page, single-space letter talking about all the different things that I needed to do and conceptualize in order to have the book fulfill its promise. If you were the person reading that letter, not knowing the future, you would have no way of knowing that you would actually be able to pull it off.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Because it sort of seems like these big successful books just come out fully formed, and they don’t.
Susan Cain:
Yeah, yeah. Or even the question of which topic. Before I was working on Quiet, I worked on so many other different writing projects, and it wasn’t clear that this was the one I was going to focus on, but somehow I just did .
Debbie Millman:
Well, that’s interesting. You’ve said that you feel like the only point of writing is telling the truth of what it’s like to be alive.
Susan Cain:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And telling those truths that people don’t really talk about in everyday life.
Susan Cain:
Yeah, I do feel that way.
Debbie Millman:
Bittersweet, your most recent book, the title of which is really Bittersweet: How Longing and Sorrow Make Us Whole, has just been released. It debuted number one on The New York Times Bestseller list. Congratulations.
Susan Cain:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
That is absolutely magical and incredible. You start Bittersweet by recounting how when you were 22 years old and still in law school, a group of friends visited your dorm room to pick you up on their way to class. And you’ve been listening to what you described as bittersweet music, which is something you’d been doing all your life. And your friends asked why you were listening to funeral tunes. You laughed and you all went off to class, and then you thought about your friend’s comment for the next 25 years.
Susan Cain:
Yeah, I did.
Debbie Millman:
Why?
Susan Cain:
Why did keep thinking about it that way?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Yeah.
Susan Cain:
I kept thinking about it because I have always felt this deep intuition that there’s something in that music and in the bittersweet sensations that it is straining to evoke. There’s something in that music that is connected to transcendence and spiritual longing. And I say this as a deeply agnostic person. I’ve never been a believer in conventional terms. And yet, I guess when I hear music like that, I’m experiencing, I think, what other people mean when they talk about God.
Debbie Millman:
Mm-hmm.
Susan Cain:
That’s how profound it is to me. And I now know not just to me, to many, many other people. But then as I continued this whole exploration, I realized it wasn’t really just about music itself. It’s more like about just this deep state of mind in which you are connected to the fact that joy and sorrow are forever paired and you’re connected to the sense of a longing for the world to be more perfect and more beautiful than it is. And that there’s something in that longing that is actually what carries you closer to that, which we long for. I don’t really know any state of mind more profound than that one.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. There’s something really powerful in the word longing because there’s a sense of it being both something you’re striving for and reaching toward, but also don’t have yet. And so there’s that sense of both having and not having or sorrow and potential.
Susan Cain:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Debbie Millman:
I actually learned from reading Bittersweet that people play happy songs on their playlists about 175 times on average, but they play sad songs 800 times.
Susan Cain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
I thought that that was one of the most profound bits of data in the book about the human experience.
Susan Cain:
I know. It’s so fascinating. There’s this YouTube video, I talked about it in the book, with this two-year-old boy who’s attending his sister’s piano recital. Off stage, you can hear there’s someone at the recital plunking out Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. And you see the boy sitting on his father’s lap, listening to Moonlight Sonata for the first time, which is just the quintessential beautiful melancholic music. And the boy has these tears streaming down his face, but they’re not tears of like, “Ah, my truck broke.” It’s not like that. It’s like just these profound tears. And this video went viral with everybody trying to figure out what that was. In one of the comments, someone said something like, he is experiencing the mix of joy and sorrow that is one of the greatest states that humans can experience.
Debbie Millman:
That’s transcendence.
Susan Cain:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
That is transcendence. I mean, I’ve always suspected that certain kinds of music somehow impact me on a sort of molecular level.
Susan Cain:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
And I don’t know if it’s sort of social conditioning or if it’s the key or if it’s neurological or all of those things, but there’s definitely comfort in music, I think, more than any other art form.
Susan Cain:
I agree. I do believe that music is the highest of all the art forms because it just goes straight to the heart of the thing.
Debbie Millman:
Mm-hmm.
Susan Cain:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You write about how Aristotle wondered why the great poets and philosophers and artists and musicians often had melancholic personalities. And that’s a word that shows up quite a lot in Bittersweet. And I’m wondering if you could define what having a melancholic personality means.
Susan Cain:
It’s a kind of tendency to states of poignancy and sorrow and longing. It’s an intense awareness of the way in which joy and sorrow are forever paired. It’s an intense awareness of the way in which everyone and everything we love most will not be here forever. And it’s with all of that, an intense vibration with the incredible beauty of the world. There’s something about the apprehension of the impermanence and of the universality or inevitability of sorrow. There’s something that comes with that, that’s intensely connected to beauty and creativity and to communion, this deep communion of the fact that all souls have to pass this way, that none of us are going to get to the Garden of Eden. Each of us is going to occasionally glimpse it, and those glimpses are going to be some of the most magical things ever to happen to us, but we’re never actually going to arrive home. We’re never going to arrive there.
There’s something about the fact of us all being together in that state of exile that is the deepest bonding agent we have. This is why I find it so mystifying to live in a culture that’s so insistent only on smiles, only on upbeat, only on optimism because I feel like, “Oh my gosh, don’t you see? Don’t you see this incredible power that we have? Don’t you see that all our art comes from this wellspring of the fact that the Garden of Eden is over there and not here? And don’t you see this is what bonds us together?”
Debbie Millman:
Yes. And that’s the whole sort of bewilderment I have around this notion of effortless perfection because I think people are much more interested in sort of the rigor and the process and the messiness and how… I mean, part of what I feel so compelled to do in my own interviews is talk about the struggle, talk about the obstacles, talk about how you overcame those things. I’m not really as interested in… I mean, if that ends up resulting in success, that’s amazing, and people then can see a potential path that they might be able to learn from. But I’m just not interested in the shiny, happy stuff.
Susan Cain:
Yeah, no, I know. I’m sure you feel this way. I’m sure you love being happy. I’m sure you prefer being happy to being sad. I know I do. I think probably every human does. So it’s not that there’s something wrong with happiness, it’s just a big pretense.
Debbie Millman:
Right. It’s projection of how you want people to see you. And that’s the part that’s so concerning because Generation Z is now… I’ve been reading how they’re being called Generation D. D for depression.
Susan Cain:
Oh, wow.
Debbie Millman:
Because of this comparative survival of the most effortlessly perfect.
Susan Cain:
Right, right, right.
Debbie Millman:
And because of the comparisons. They take down pictures if they don’t get enough likes or if they don’t get enough feedback, and that breaks my heart.
Susan Cain:
Yeah. No, it must be so incredibly difficult to be growing up in that kind of an environment. I think what people really want, I think people want to feel inspired and connected by stories of the world as it actually is as opposed to the world the way we’re pretending it to be. So that’s just what I wanted to kind of open up more space for us to talk about.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I know that when you were writing Quiet, I read that you were worried that people would think you were really talking about sort of being a misanthrope.
Susan Cain:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And equating introversion with not liking people. And that was not your intention or your message. And now with Bittersweet, you’ve written that you think there’s a danger of people thinking it’s a book advocating for a depressive state.
Susan Cain:
Yeah, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And that’s absolutely not what you’re talking about at all. It seems like, psychologically, our culture doesn’t distinguish between melancholy or even sorrow and depression, although they’re completely different and distinct states. And I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit because I know that that’s a really important part of the book.
Susan Cain:
It is really important. It’s not just our culture, it’s the whole field of psychology. I mean, one of the first things I did was, I started typing the word melancholy into PubMed, which is the database where you define clinical articles, and there is no distinction made. You type in melancholy, and what you get is a bunch of articles about depression. And I started asking around with esteemed psychologists and they were like, “Yeah, there is a difference. Here’s what the difference is.” But you can’t find it written down anywhere in the field. Only now there is beginning to emerge kind of a 2.0 in the field of positive psychology that’s saying, positive psychology shouldn’t be only about looking at states of utmost cheer and optimism. It should be about a deeper understanding of what human flourishing actually is. And that humans flourish by existing with these two poles of light and dark and joy and sorrow. That’s what humanity must do. That’s what it always has done.
I feel like we’re at the glimmers of starting to get there, but yes, I have the same fear of being misunderstood that I had with Quiet in that way. I gave a TED Talk about bittersweetness in 2019. It was the summer before the pandemic. So people were not of a mind at that point to be thinking about these kinds of things. And I came off the stage and some people I knew in the audience were like, “Oh, I never knew you were depressive.” And I was like, “No, no, no, that’s not what I was saying.” And you know what, I probably am somewhere on that spectrum or something, but I think these are differences of degree, and that the differences of degree are so meaningful as to effectively be differences of kind, by which I mean-
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.
Susan Cain:
Yeah. If you’re in a state of depression, as I understand it, it’s like an emotional black hole and you feel numb and you feel despair and worthless and hopeless and all these things. Whereas the state of bittersweetness, you’re not feeling any of that. You’re feeling a sorrow for the trials that humanity has to face and the evils that come into it and all of that. But you’re also feeling this incredible love and amazement at how beautiful everything also is. And it’s like, the more you feel one, the more you’re then feeling the other. They go together.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I’ve experienced three episodes of depression in my life. And I can tell you that there’s a very, very different emotional experience between depression and sadness.
Susan Cain:
Mm-hmm.
Debbie Millman:
I try not to say things like I’m feeling depressed because I know what feeling depressed is. So I don’t want to say I’m feeling depressed the way I think people just say I’m feeling depressed because I know what real depression feels like. I try to sort of position it or describe it as I feel blue. And that feels more accurate. I’m not in a depressive hole where I can’t get out of bed, where I can’t think about the future with any hope. I’m just catatonic and very, very sad. Blue is more melancholic. And I think that’s why Joni Mitchell called the album Blue aside from the song.
Susan Cain:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
That’s sort of the perfect… And I know you have the same feeling about Leonard Cohen’s music. I think I have about Joni Mitchell’s. It’s the most sort of beautiful, sad, joyful sorrowful, light, and dark music on the planet.
Susan Cain:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
And that’s how you just sort of define bittersweetness in the book. It’s a state in which you can truly inhabit the idea that life is always simultaneously joy and sorrow, light and dark. I’m wondering where longing comes in in that because the longing part is still that part that I’m so invested in in Bittersweet.
Susan Cain:
Me too. It’s probably the heart of it all to me. I believe that this sense of longing that we have, this sense of existential longing for that, which is most perfect, beautiful, true love, the pure essence of love, that longing is, it’s the core part of the human soul.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Susan Cain:
And we don’t have a language for talking about that I think because we have understood this longing only within the realm of religion. Religion is probably the best medium that we found for giving expression to this longing. So we long for Eden. We long for Mecca. We long for Zion.
Debbie Millman:
Love.
Susan Cain:
Yeah. I mean, the way the sophists put it, they call it the longing for the beloved of the soul. To me, that says it all. But because we have religion over here and we have secular life over there, we don’t have as much of a way of talking about this kind of existential longing and everyday life. And yet our art expresses it for us, and that’s why you have Dorothy longing for somewhere over the rainbow.
Debbie Millman:
Mm-hmm, yes. Home sweet home.
Susan Cain:
Yeah, home sweet home. We’re longing for home. As the religious have always said, “I’m a poor wayfaring stranger. I want to go home.” Harry Potter, like all these different protagonists of children’s fiction, they enter the story at the moment that they become orphans. It’s not an accident. It’s not an accident. He enters the story at the moment he is now going to spend the rest of his life longing for these parents who he’ll never remember. There’s something about that, that that is who we are at our very essence and it’s the best part of our nature because the fact that we’re so beset by this longing, first of all, it has a sweetness to it. But second, the more we lean into that longing, the closer paradoxically we get to the thing we’re longing for.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Susan Cain:
And that’s what the mystical traditions all teach. They all teach the same thing. They tell you, “Be thirsty, be thirsty,” because the idea is, the thirstier you are, the closer you get to its quench.
Debbie Millman:
You write about how the Ancient Greeks use the word pothos, which is different than pathos. So it’s P-O-T-H-O-S, which means longing for what is beautiful and unattainable. And reading Bittersweet, I learned that a young Alexander the Great described himself as seized by pothos as he sat on a riverbank and gazed into the distance, and that it was pothos that set Homer’s Odyssey in motion. With the ship wrecked, Odyssey is longing for home. The poem literally starts with him homesick, weeping on a beach.
Susan Cain:
Yeah. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And I wanted to share one of my favorite literary quotes about homesickness that I’ve been quoting for feels like my entire adult life. It’s from a letter Robert Frost wrote to the poet Louis Untermeyer. And I don’t know if you know this, it was in 1916. Talking about what a poem actually is, and he states, “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a love sickness. It is a reaching out toward expression, an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”
Susan Cain:
Oh, my gosh.
Debbie Millman:
I know. Goosebumps, right?
Susan Cain:
Oh, my gosh. Yes, total goosebumps. I can’t believe you found that. It’s like, that sizes all up.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I’ve been quoting this for years. I don’t if you know this, well, if you haven’t heard that, John F. Kennedy used that quote in the last speech he ever gave in October 1963, when he was visiting Amherst College.
Susan Cain:
Ha, did not know that.
Debbie Millman:
Yes. You write at length about a psychologist, Dr. Dacher Keltner. Did I say it right?
Susan Cain:
Yes, Dacher Keltner.
Debbie Millman:
Dacher Keltner, who has conducted really pioneering work on what he refers to as the compassionate instinct. He also believes that when we think of human nature, we tend to think about survival of the fittest. But Dr. Keltner says, we should also really be talking about survival of the kindest because as humans, the only way that we survive is by being able to respond to the cries of our infants. And what has radiated outward from there in your writing is that humans not only respond to our own infant’s cries, we react to the cries of other people’s infants. And then we react to other human beings’ in distress in general. Did I get that right?
Susan Cain:
Yeah, you did. You did. Dacher’s work is really incredible and it’s rooted in Darwin’s work. And the thing to know about Darwin, the layperson’s view is survival of the fittest. So I don’t know what comes to mind when your typical person thinks of Darwin, but I’m assuming, they’re thinking in very competitive terms like that. But Darwin was actually a very gentle melancholic type of person. He adored his wife. He adored his, I think he had 10 children.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, my God.
Susan Cain:
Yeah. And he loved them. And most of all, he loved his daughter Annie, who really both parents were incredibly close with. And then Annie died of Scarlet fever when she was 10. And he and his wife were absolutely heartbroken. He was a very sensitive soul. His father had wanted him to be a doctor, but he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. I guess in those days people had surgery without anesthesia. So the whole thing horrified him. He was way too sensitive for that. And he went and he studied his beetles and his birds and stuff.
It was really Darwin who had first noticed this compassionate instinct. He noticed in animals that there was this impulse to react to the suffering of other animals. And he noted that it happened so instantaneously and in such a preconscious way that he felt it had to be an incredibly deep-seated instinct. And then enter Dacher Keltner 150 years later, and he’s making all these discoveries, like we have the vagus nerve, which is the biggest bundle of nerves in our bodies. It’s so fundamental to who we are that it regulates our breathing, our digestion. And also, our vagus nerve, if we see another being in distress, becomes activated. It’s at the same level, it’s as basic to us as our need to breathe and our need to digest food, is our preconscious response to other being suffering.
So it’s not like it’s just a Sunday school teaching that’s imposed on us from up on high. It’s like, this is who we are, and who we are is also competitive and sometimes cruel. These two things sit side by side in human nature, but this compassionate aspect, it is real. And its foundation, you could say, is sadness in a way. It’s like, part of the reason parents bond with infants is because we are designed to respond to those infants’ cries. So this is-
Debbie Millman:
To have to recognize it as something that sort of needs to be attended to.
Susan Cain:
Exactly.
Debbie Millman:
What’s so interesting to me is that all of those other things, digestion, breathing, those are all involuntary.
Susan Cain:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
We can’t control those things.
Susan Cain:
Exactly.
Debbie Millman:
And so this comes from the same place where we can’t control this need to take care of another being that is close to us in pain or sorrow.
Susan Cain:
Yeah, exactly. That’s why I say it’s not like a Sunday school teaching like, “Now I will remember to be kind to somebody.” It’s like, you don’t have a choice. This is what Darwin noticed. You don’t feel good when you see someone else who’s in trouble. You yourself then feel like you’re in trouble. It’s vicarious and it’s preconscious. So this is why I think there’s that same impulse that we find in the sad music and everything else. This is why those stimuli trigger in us feelings of love because this is part of how our love mechanics work.
Debbie Millman:
Another major learning for me in reading Bittersweet was the idea that showing sorrow is more powerful than actually showing anger. And I’ve realized over time that basically, almost without fault, every feeling of anger that I have has an underlying foundation of sadness. That really it’s about sadness first and I can either choose to express that through sorrow or through anger, and anger tends to be easier. And I think that’s why so many people don’t even recognize their own sorrow because they’re really operating first out of anger.
Susan Cain:
I think that’s right. And the sorrow gets socialized out of us. That’s especially true in the workplace.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Susan Cain:
There’s one study I talked about in the book where they interviewed people about different things that had happened to them at their work, and people would describe situations that were just clearly sad and painful, but they would never use words like that to describe them. They would only use words like frustrated and angry because those are the only words people feel like they have permission to say.
Debbie Millman:
Isn’t that interesting? We can’t bring our full selves to that workplace. Before I let you go, I want to go back to something we discussed earlier, the distinction between depression and longing. You write about Columbia University psychiatry professor Philip Muskin, in Bittersweet, who stated, “Creative people are not creative when they’re depressed.” And you suggest that it may be more useful to view creativity through the lens of bittersweetness of grappling simultaneously with darkness and light, and go on to state that it’s not pain that equals art. It’s that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye and to decide to turn it into something better. And I’m wondering, because this is really a show so much about the origins of creativity, do you think that this is something that people can do consciously?
Susan Cain:
Yes, I do. I do. I mean, for some people, I think it happens automatically. But yeah, I think absolutely there’s a choice we can make when we find ourselves at those moments of pain or processing past ones where you can kind of leave it unattended and it’s going to have its way of taking itself out on you or on the people around you, or you can make the conscious choice to turn it into something else. I’m always mindful about saying that because I feel like the last thing someone in pain needs is like, “Now another thing on my to-do list. Not only am I having pain, but now I have to turn around and turn it into something different.” But there is something incredibly liberating about trying to do that and about just understanding during those moments that there is a special experience you’re having at that moment that you probably won’t be having again. I lost my father and my brother to COVID.
Debbie Millman:
I know. I’m so sorry.
Susan Cain:
Oh, thank you. And I do remember, especially raw moments, you feel in the immediate shock and aftermath after a loved one, dies. I mean, from a writer’s point of view, there was a kind of intensity during those moments. I didn’t always feel like writing, but I remember feeling like if I don’t capture this now, it will be gone because there’s something really intense happening at this very moment. I happen to be a writer, but there’s a thousand different ways of expressing and transforming pain into something else.
Debbie Millman:
Well, it also doesn’t have to happen at the same time.
Susan Cain:
That’s true. That’s a really good point.
Debbie Millman:
There are moments where I’m feeling really sad and feeling sorry for myself. People often ask me what I do when that happens, and I say, I just wallow. I mean, I’m old enough now to know that I can’t just push it away. Let me feel it, let me metabolize it. I know it eventually will pass or change, and so just experience it when you’re feeling it. And then maybe feel like you’re connected to other people that might be feeling that too in a way that you couldn’t feel otherwise.
Susan Cain:
Yeah, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And then when you are feeling better, you can try to transform it into something else that includes understanding the world in a different way maybe.
Susan Cain:
Yeah. It doesn’t have to be like a painting that’s going to hang on a gallery wall or something. It could be baking a cake or it could be, as you said, understanding the world differently. I’m always struck that in the wake of 9/11, suddenly there were all these people signing up to become firefighters and teachers. And then in the wake of the pandemic, we have people signing up for medical school and nursing school. So I think there’s something in the human spirit that looks at pain and tries to turn it into something of meaning. It’s just what we do naturally. You might say that the opposite things should be happening, right? A lot of firemen die in a burning building, so now there’s more people signing up to be firefighters. That just doesn’t make sense, you might say.
Debbie Millman:
Right.
Susan Cain:
Or people are dying in a pandemic. Why would everyone be signing up to become doctors and nurses now? But there’s something in the human spirit that does that.
Debbie Millman:
That calls us to it.
Susan Cain:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Speaking of baking a cake, I have one last question for you.
Susan Cain:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
I read that a few times a year, you try to like cooking.
Susan Cain:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
I was wondering how that was going for you.
Susan Cain:
Oh, my gosh. I think I have one of those times coming on, actually. I haven’t had one for a while. But yeah, I’m not a natural cook, and I always wish that I were. I always admire people who are domestic geniuses who whip things up, and it’s all, as we said, effortless for them. It is not for me, but I love the idea of it.
Debbie Millman:
Me too. I’m eternally grateful now that my wife likes to do it way more than I do or can.
Susan Cain:
Oh, you are so lucky. That is awesome.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Yeah. Susan, for me, the idea at the heart of Bittersweet is how people can transform pain into creativity, transcend, and love. It is an exquisitely beautiful book. And I want to thank you for sharing it with the world and for joining me today on Design Matters.
Susan Cain:
Well, thank you so much, Debbie, for having me and for the work that you do. It was such a treat to get to know you. I feel like we have to get together in person after this.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. So many other things I want to tell you and share with you. Susan Cain’s remarkable new book is titled Bittersweet: How Longing and Sorrow Make Us Whole. You can find out more about Susan Cain and read lots more about her work at susancain.net. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.