Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to Econ Talk. in to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done

going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econ talk.org we'd love to hear from you. Today is October 8, 2024,

my guest is author Susan Kane.

Her first book was Quiet, Her most recent book and the subject of

today's conversation is bittersweet. How sorrow and longing make us whole.

Susan, welcome to Econ Talk. Thank you so much Russ.

It's great to be here with you.

Tell us about the title of the book.

Of course, it's the subject of the book.

What does Bittersweet mean to you?

Bittersweet is about the fact that we live constantly in a stateweet state is to be kind of acutely aware of this, to be acutely aware of the impermanence of the world and somehow amidst all of that to for that

knowledge to give us a kind of piercing sense of joy and beauty along with everything else.

So it's just this it's this curious state of being that to be aware of the difficulties of life along with the joys of life is can somehow be

uplifting as opposed to its opposite which is what people expect it to be. Your opening of the books are an incredibly beautiful essay on just this phenomenon and it's a little tricky

to pin down.

And in fact, you rely on music and you rely on poetry,

two things that I think of as capturing the human experience that's hard to put into words.

Talk about how music gave you an entry and really started this book going.

Yeah, I mean, excuse me, it's funny that you use the word rely because I don't think of myself as having relied on music so much to illustrate this incredibly

ineffable topic. It's rather that music is what made the topic relevant in the first place because I've been having this

experience all my life and I know from the reaction to the book that many other

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