Susan Cain

eight years on the New York Times bestseller List. Susan's Ted Talk has been viewed over forty million times. Lincoln named her the top six influencer in the world, just behind Richard Branson and Melinda Gates, who has also been a What's Her Story guest. Her new masterpiece, Bitter Sweet, How Sorrow and Longing Makes Us Whole, is out this week. Using your first book, Quiet became an international phenomenon. What was it like choosing a topic for this book. I

don't think I choose my topic so much. I think my topics are just a deep part of me, and I think for me, writing is a little bit like I I just thought of this metaphor just the other day.

I think it's a little bit like having a message that I really want to communicate and sending the message out in a bottle, you know, and I'm like working on the message for years and years and not really knowing if it's going to make it to the other shore, meaning not knowing at first whether other people are going to resonate with it or not. But it just feels very deeply important and true, and so I do it.

So like with Quiet, it took me. I mean, when I first started working on Quiet, I thought that I was working on a very idiosyncratic project that would be kind of marginal. I had no idea that it was going to touch the gigantic nerve that it did. And now it's been really interesting with Bitter Sweet, where I'm talking about the creativity and the connection and the other powers that come from embracing the more bitter sweet side of life. I'm getting the same kinds of messages from

readers that I got from Quiet. It's almost like the same language of feeling permission to be themselves, feeling seen, feeling understood, validating a way of existence, like understanding um something about themselves that they had never been able to put into words before. So it's kind of like there's an uncanny similarity, I would say, But all of it comes from that message in a bottle type of of

idea selection. I guess I noticed on your Twitter profile you have a quote that's a C. S. Lewis quote, and you wrote looking for the place where all the beauty came from? Have you always been someone like when you were a child, where you someone who was kind of looking at the bigger picture or finding the magic or asking those questions. Yeah, honestly, I really was. I remember a very distinct memory. I think I was four years old and suddenly being hit by the question of

what on earth are we all doing here? Like what is this all about? Why are we here? How should we be living? And I just I don't think I've ever stopped asking that question that I feel like I'm asking it almost every minute of my day. What did you do with that when you were seven? I mean, when I was little, I was just asking it. I don't know that I did that much with it, but I guess I've just always been thinking in those terms.

But you know, when when you're reading and writing as a kid, because I was doing both a lot, Like that's always been my orientation, you know, you're much more interested just in stories and telling stories and writing stories. So that's what it was. Um. It was really when I was older that these questions that have been swirling around in my mind all that time took shape in

writing nonfiction and writing about ideas. And you know the quote that I have on my Twitter handle about looking for the place where all the beauty comes from, that that idea is really at the heart of this new book, Bitter Sweet that I've written, because to me, the essence of bitter Sweetness really is this state that I believe all humans come into the world with, where you know, you come into this world crying, right, and there is a sense, no matter how happy a life that you're living,

there's there's a sense that we all belong in a more perfect and beautiful world from which we've been banished. And and you see that idea expressed in all of our religions, you know, the longing for the garden of Eden, and the longing for Mecca, and the longing for Zion, the longing for the beloved of the soul, the longing for somewhere over the rainbow. In secular terms, we see

this all over the place. And I believe that when we have those moments where you see something so beautiful that it brings tears your eyes, that the tears are coming because it's triggering that longing. It's like you're seeing a glimpse of that world that we all long for. And that's part of why we love art the way we do, because it's it's a it's a manifestation of that.

The way you talk about longing and bitter sweet moments, I think that it's something that everyone can relate to, no matter your personality in your own life, What is

the relationship between love and longing? I guess I'm a hopeless romantic in a certain way, and also grew up on the same diet that everybody else did of watching you know, kind of romantic Happily ever after films and all that kind of thing, and I think it took me a while to understand like the true nature of love relationships with friends also, but especially romantic love reallyation ships that you you could say in a way that that we kind of have to learn to live outside

the garden of Eden in a way, you know, like with your friends, Let's say you start realizing, oh my gosh, like I'm dreadfully imperfect and my friends are too, and I'm going to love them in spite of that. And with romantic relationships, you know, there's a feeling when you first enter one, especially like a deep and meaningful one.

There's a feeling, especially for the first few months, where you kind of feel like, you know, this is it, Like I I found the garden of Eden and we found it together, and then you start to understand, well, actually, my partner is not perfect. I'm not perfect and like and until you understand that that's the nature of reality, you can feel like, Okay, I better go to the next relationship because maybe that one will deliver me to Eden. Like you're not thinking that in so many words, obviously,

but that's what we're experiencing. So I would say like the growing up process for me really was a matter of understanding kind of the difference between what's wonderful in our day to day lives and the state of you know, perfection, truth, beauty, unconditional pure love that we long for, and to understand that those two things can exist side by side. Early on, you learned that you weren't making partner after many years of working your butt off in your law firm, And

that also coincided with the end of a relationship. And it seems like that explosion of sorts changed a lot of things for you. It changed so many things for me. UM. So I went into what I called a state of freefall at that point, because I suddenly I knew kind of instinctively, I probably wasn't going back to law. So I had no career, suddenly no love. I was no longer living in the same apartment that I had moved

out of the heartment when I ended this relationship. Um. That had always felt wrong, and so I was kind of floating around. And I fell into a relationship with a guy who who was not fully available, not fully the right person, but he was a musician and a lyricist and a lit up kind of person, and it became a kind of obsessive love of the kind I guess everybody has to go through at one point or another.

But it's they're they're quite painful, I think, those relationships, and and no matter what I did, I couldn't shake it. Until one day I sat down with a friend of mine, Naomi, who had been patiently listening to me regale her with stories of the object of this obsession, and and Naomie said to me, you know, if you're this obsessed with somebody, it's because they represent something that you're longing for. So what are you longing for? Like, what's really at the

heart of this? And it really was one of these blinding, you know, skills fall from your eyes kinds of movements, because I instantly knew that that he represented the world of writing and music and art that I had always wanted to be a part of. In the first place. I was never meant to be a lawyer. He was kind of like an emissary from that more perfect and

beautiful world that I longed for. And as soon as I saw that, the obsession melted away, almost cinematically, it was like it was gone, and and I started really writing for real and have never looked back since. So, um, yeah, I guess I would say to anybody listening, you know, if you find yourself beset by some kind of deep and existential longing, I would really examine it and and try to ask yourself, like, what does it really mean? Beyond what it appears to me you may not be

longing for a person or for the house. Do you think you're longing for or whatever it is it may be it represents something else to you at the time when you figure this out. Was it scary, Well, it would have been scary, But I I did everything with a big backup plan, I would say. I mean so, first of all, even though I knew deep down I probably wasn't going back. I did interview for a few in house positions and things like that, and I just

couldn't bring myself to go in that direction. So what I did I decided I really wanted to make writing the center of my life. Um I signed up for this class and creative nonfiction writing. I knew the night of that first class, I felt so deeply that I had found my home and my center and that's what I wanted to be doing. But truly, I did not ever think I could make a living from writing. Like I said to myself, if you published something by the time you're seventy five, that's the goal. So I didn't

think writing was going to be the thing. So what I did is I set up a little freelance business teaching people negotiation skills, especially to women, because negotiation was not something I had felt came naturally to me, but I had studied it a lot in law school and as a lawyer, so I felt like I could help other people for whom it didn't seem to come naturally, and so that was how I was paying the bills.

So that made it less scary. And I always say to people, you know, like, there's such a message in our culture that you know that if you truly have a passion for the business you want to start or the art you want to create or whatever, you know, you should be willing to check everything in the service of that passion and take the big risk. And I think that's the worst advice ever, because first of all, you may fail, and that's okay, but it's not okay

if if you have no backup plan. But also you can't even really mentally focus on your business or your art or whatever if you're so anxious about not being able to pay the bills. So I'm a big believer in the plan b and doing things, you know, kind of the less glamorous but more practical way. Then you met your now husband, and there's something about your relationship with him. That's really remarkable that you learned on just the second date when I met my now husband Ken.

He went to law school too, by the way, but he never practiced for a day in his life and he didn't take the bar even And he spent the nine nineties as a u N peacekeeper. He was basically like in all the war zones of the nineties like Rwanda and Somalia, Liberia, Haiti, Cambodia. And he came back and he wrote this really incredible memoir of his experiences. It's called Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures, A True

Story from Hell on Earth. It's really really great. And and so when we met, he was just publishing this book and it was a bestseller, and you know, and it was this really important work. And meanwhile I had this failed legal career and at the time, I was writing a memoir in sonnet form, because that's what I was doing. And and I came to our second date and I brought some of the sonnets with me, and and later that night he sent me this email, and um,

I have it reprinted in the book. He basically wrote in this email, like in these gigantic letters, UM, holy sh it, drop everything right woman, right um. And it was just like the most amazing, amazing encouragement and expressed in his very typically exuberant fashion. And that's why it's framed in my office all these years later, and and all these years later, I would say, he's still my biggest cheering section and gets even more excited than I do,

you know. And my new book Betters We came out seems to be doing really well and he's really excited and checking Amazon constantly. So it's still like that. But I also will say that part of what I teach people from all the years that I've spent working on introversion and extroversion, from my first book Quiet, is to

understand that different people express enthusiasm differently. So like one of the things in our relationship is I have had to learn when something good happens for him to kind of amp up my enthusiasm or not what I feel, but the way I express it I have to amp up because I'm just naturally kind of more muted in the way I talk about things than he would be. And then he's had to learn I think that I'm never going to express it the way he would and

that doesn't mean that I don't care. And so I think understanding those temperamental differences between partners is really life saving for a partnership. And now quick break. You know, there are other relationships in our lives that center us in our court of who we are. And you have a complicated relationship with your mother, how does that impact

your life, your work, your parenting, know, all of those things. Basically, my mother and I, you know, like I had a kind of garden of Eden to use that word again, a garden of Eden childhood of like a really really deep and loving relationship with my mother, and then adolescence hit us with gale force winds. And I guess that's

very common for many mothers and daughters in adolescence. But our situation was, you know, imagine the typical times a hundred and so after that, there was a deep way in which our relationship seemed never to be the same again until a kind of storybook ending that I wrote about in her later years. But all those years where it seemed never to be the same again, it was like my life was really doing so well in so many ways, and yet I had this thing. It was like this um it was like a grief that I

had never mourned. So I couldn't even speak about my mother without crying. Like if you said to me, where did your mother grow up? And I and my answer would have been my mother grew up in Brooklyn. I couldn't say those simple words without crying because I couldn't speak of her without crying, because that's how intense the loss of that, that primary, most fundamental love was. You know, like I guess, the first love relationship you have, the most intense one, it becomes symbolic of all love for

a while. And so that's what it was like for me, and I think that's part of what led to me exploring all the ideas and bitter sweet of like what because we all are going to lose love at some point, whether it's through a relationship ending or bereave mint or worse, or you know, there's a thousand different ways that it can happen, And how do we face that? What do

we do with that? And the thing that I really did learn over time, because I I really did come to a place of let's say ninety eight or nine, healing from it, I think, but I really did come to a place of understanding that that really love is the essence, and love exists in infinite forms. So you can lose one particular love relationship and whether you get it back again later as I did with my mother or not, love itself has a way of returning in

many different forms. And that's what I that's what I really came to understand. You had so much guilt wrapped up in the relationship with your mother, and um you blamed yourself for so much of it for so long. What role does guilt play in your life today? I would say guilt is still my Achilles heal emotionally because that was the mechanism of what went wrong. I guess

in this most formative relationship. Still today, when something goes wrong, I will immediately assume that I did something wrong or or somebody you know. If I'm in a conflict with someone and the other person is, you know, saying you've done such and such, like I I automatically assume that's right. Times ten. That's my first emotional place that I go to.

Because I have thought about this a lot and worked on this a lot, I can often remove myself from that place and then come to a place that sees

things a little more clearly. But I do think that for all of us, whatever is the primary mechanism of like an emotional issue that we had early in life, that does become a kind of Achilles heel for life or a sort of siren song for life, and that you can work through it, but it's always going to be there underlying, and so you just you have to be aware of that and aware of those and in seas and yourself. But I will I will say, like you asked me about my relationship with my children, I've

been like really thrilled to see that. I think I've replicated none of it with my children. I'm pretty sure they would agree with that statement. You know, my my boys are teenagers now, we still get along famously. And the difficulty that my mother had during my adolescence when I started to separate as an adult, I'm not experiencing it. I I truly don't feel it. So therefore I don't

think any of those dynamics are getting replicated. And I will say that I swore to myself when I was a teenager and I saw how much trouble my mother was having with me growing into an independence, I swear to myself that I would have a fulfilling and meaningful career because I've always felt that my mother wouldn't have struggled and suffered the way she did if she had had that. So I do think that's helped me a lot.

You talk a lot about parenting in your book and how we try to parents the sadness out of our children. How do you think we can overcome that? It's really hard to overcome it. Um, I do think we can, but it's it's hard to overcome it. And I remember my mother in law. I'm really close with my mother in law. She's a very um she's really fun, she's very upbeat. She has sort of my my husband's very exuberant temperament. They're very similar that way. But she's also

like Samantha like me. She's a huge leaky faucet. We actually joke that I should have called this book Leaky Faucet the Bitter Sweet Book. Like you know, she'll she'll tear up at the drop of a hat. So anyway, she just randomly told me right after my son was born, my first one, She's like, you know, it's really hard when your kids are upset about something. Because we know what we can handle, so we can handle our own troubles, but when it's your child's troubles, you kind of don't

know exactly at first what they can handle. So not only are you experiencing it vicariously, but you're experiencing it in an amplified form. And I do think that makes it really tough as parents when our kids are crying or going through it a tough time. You know, you just feel if you're not careful, you can feel all of that as if it's filling up the whole world. But I tell this story in the book of a very small trouble that my kids went through and how

normalizing sadness was so helpful. And the story is that when they were really little, we rented this house in the countryside for a week and right next to the house was a field in which lived two donkeys, and the kids fell in love with these donkeys. Their names were Lucky and Norman, and they spent all day every day,

you know, feeding them carrots and it was bliss. And then came the last two days of the vacation where they start realizing that we're going to have to go home and say goodbye to the donkeys, and they start crying themselves to sleep, like they're just totally bereft, because of course that kind of goodbye to a young child signifies all goodbyes, and we don't know it. It's it's

kind of like symbolic of mortality itself. They don't they don't know that technically, but that's what they're reacting to. And so you know what, your your kids crying at night and you're like trying to comfort them. So we're saying all these things of like, well maybe we'll come

back next year and you'll see them again. Um, someone else will come and take care of the donkeys, and nothing is helping until until we say to them, you know, this is actually part of life, this sadness, and you won't feel it forever, but but you're going to feel it again. You've felt it before, you felt it, you're going to feel it again. Everybody feels it. This is part of what life is, and just know that and

you'll feel better in a few days. But it was like the normalizing of the sadness was the only thing that made them stop crying. Because, especially for children who are growing up in relative comfort, they are sent the message that life is what's happening, that real life is when everything's going well, and that the moments where you're saying goodbye, or the moments of sickness or the moments of bereavement or you know, whatever it is, that those

are the moments that are detours from real life. And so of course then they're going to be resisting all of that because we're not supposed to go in the detour. But you know, if you can help them see that this is all part of the experience, it doesn't make it less sad, but there's less resistance to it. Well. And then, and there's such a delicate message in your book for parents, right because it's not that you want parents to ignore their kids feelings and say, oh, crying

is part of life. You know, you go go off and cry. That's kind of the opposite of what you're saying. You're saying, when they're crying, help them assign meaning to that and help them accept what the pain is. And I think that's so often as parents we do the pendulum one way or the other. We try to wipe away the tears, or we you know, ignore children. And

I think it's so important to to thread that needle. Um. In many ways, I think your next book could be a parenting book because there is so much there that that can be applied to parenting. And similarly, by the way, there is a book I used to give to people when they had experienced grief and and the death of a loved one. And I think that in many ways your book can now be that book because there's so much in there about grief and how to manage grief.

And I think it's it's so healthy the perspective you share. Yeah, it's interesting because you know, it didn't start out as a book about grief, and I I don't think about as explicitly a grief book. You know, it's it started out, really is UM me trying to answer the question of why it is that so many of us have such an intense and intensely pleasurable reaction to sad music. Um, I was trying to figure out how on earth that

could possibly be. And yeah, and it kind of set me off on this quest for years, for years and years, looking at this bittersweet tradition of like all these religions and artists and writers who have been talking about this for thousands of years, about the way in which our melancholy sides are connected to our deepest creativity and our deepest communion, and you know, to a sense of of

the divine. Even whether you're secular or atheist, there's there's like it doesn't matter, there's some sense of longing for some higher state, and all of this is connected with melancholy. So the book started out as that inquiry, But of course you can't really look at that subject without thinking about bereavement and about how like mortality and impermanence is really at the heart of what melancolia is. Um you know, it's like an intense awareness of life's impermanence at every moment.

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your favorite new sales channel. Intrigued learn more? At join the w marketplace dot com. We're gonna now go to this speed round Susan, where we're going to ask you just a few questions and you can give us quick answers. What book are you reading right now? Who by Fire? Which is a book about Leonard co which just came

out by the author Mattie Friedman. You know from reading Bitter Sweet, I'm kind of obsessed with Leonard Cohne, and I even dedicated the book to him, especially like his the line from anthem, his song Anthem, which is there's a crack and everything that's where the light gets in. What was the last thing that made you cry? It's so funny because this happens to me so frequently that now I can't even think of one. But I don't know.

I'm just going to say, I think of tears and goose bumps in the same category goose bumps, or maybe like a slightly milder version of the same phenomenon, And I just had them about five times during this conversation. Who leaves you star struck? I mean musicians do all the time, like every single day, because there's not a day that I'm not like sitting down and listening to music,

so they're constantly leaving me star struck. There's a musician name Benjamin Clementine whose song Condolence I was just listening to the other day. UM. I actually put together this Bitter Sweet playlist that goes along with my book, so you can find it if you're curious, on Spotify or Apple Music. And I have that song on the playlist. It's really beautiful. What kind of sleeper are you? I used to be an amazing, amazing sleeper, and I was

very dedicated to getting my eight hours and everything. I have to say, Now that I m in my middle years, I have a lot of trouble sleeping. I'm trying to figure that out. Well. Luke Burns is our male perspective, and he always joins us at the end of the show with often the most important question. I really like your perspective on introverts. Um. I have a thirteen year old daughter. I'm trying to figure out exactly where she falls in this category, but on certain days she's a

certain way, so I'm just gonna leave it alone. Do you ever ask her about it? Do you ever ask her what she thinks she is? I'm trying not to leave eater. Yeah, I can see that because I'm not really good always all the time asking her questions without

trying to lead her in a direction. So you have to like figure out which are the activities where your child is more likely to tell you more, Like I've noticed with my boys who are teenagers, like if we go and play catch while they're throwing the football, so there's so much more forthcoming than at any other moment. So I don't know what it is for your daughter, but maybe it's candy get her in a good mood. But lou, actually there is so much great parenting stuff

in Susan's book. You know, lose right now in an interesting spot in his own life because he's his daughter has just come to live with him, and she's a teenager, and so maybe you could share some of your pearls of wisdom of parenting a teenager and gaining a teenager's trust throughout such a difficult life phase. Yeah, I mean, I guess my big thing is um And I don't even know if the following thing is only about teenagers.

I think it's about people in general. But to really not have judgment, you know, you just want to understand you don't want to judge. And I think that if you approach a teenager that way, they're just much more likely to let you in and open up and keep their relationship healthy because you're communicating to them without even having to say it in so many words that you're

just totally on their side. And then when you do have to set limits of like you know, you probably really shouldn't do such and such thing, I don't think it's in your best interest. They know that you're not coming from a place of judgment, You're not coming from a place of overreaction. You're just like reasoning it through with them. Sam, I have to say that I almost

cried about seventy two times talking with Susan. I have to say that I had no idea I would relate to her book so deeply in her messages so deeply, and I really think everyone would benefit from understanding it.

I think we see the world in black and white so often, right like that person is a happy person, that persons sad person, that person is a dark person, that prints is a light person, or you know that person is optimistic and that person is pessimistic, and and really, after reading her book and just listening to her in our conversation, it makes you realize that, like the ideal is to blend those things and accept all of it. I think that's a really profound takeaway to a profound message.

Life is better sweet, all of it. A single day can be better sweet, and emotion can be better sweet. And I think we want everything to be happy, and it's not right, even the parts that we talked about parenting. Because my kids are a little that really resonated with me to prepare them and arm them with the fact that bitter sweet is okay, sadness is okay, longing is okay. They bring into sharp clarity the good parts, and they

show that you care. And somehow we've gotten away from that as a society, that we should have those feelings and that we should embrace them and that they're okay. Right, Well, if you think about it, it's like all we do know is like push pills on people to make them happier, or you know, there's a zillion books on happiness, and it really makes you realize that what if we just accepted all of the emotions and allow people to feel more, maybe that would make them more fulfilled and happier right.

Thanks for listening to What's Her Story with Sam and Amy. We would appreciate it if you leave her view wherever you get your podcasts, and of course, connect with us on social media at What's Her Story podcast. What's Her Story with Sam and Amy is powered by my company, The Riveter at their Riveter dot c O and Sam's company, park Place Payments at park place Payments dot com. Thanks to our producer Stacy Parra and our male perspective blue Burns h