Better - by Arianna Rebolini (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A gutsy, riveting memoir that intimately explores suicide, its legacy in families, and the cyclical, crooked path of recovery.

Why do so many people want to die--and how do we begin to understand what makes a person choose suicide?

After a decade of therapy and a stint in a psychiatric ward to treat suicidal depression, Arianna Rebolini was "better." She'd published her first book, enjoyed an influential, rewarding publishing job, and celebrated both a marriage and the birth of her first child--but none of it was enough to keep the desire to die at bay. One night, grappling with overwhelming debt and a prolonged depression, she composed goodbye letters to her husband and son while they slept just feet away.

In Better, Arianna interweaves the story of her month-long period of crisis with decades of personal and family history, from her first cry for help in the fourth grade with a plastic knife, to her fears of passing down the dark seed of suicide to her own son, and her brother's own life-threatening affliction. To make sense of this dark desire, Arianna pored over the journals, memoirs, and writings of famous suicides, and eventually developed theories on what makes a person suicidal. Her curiosity was driven by the morbid, impossible need to understand what happens in the fatal moment between wanting to kill oneself and doing it--or, unthinkably, the moment between regretting the action and realizing it can't be undone. When her own brother became institutionalized, Arianna realized that all of the patterns and trenchant insights could not crack the shell of his annihilating depression--and that the only way to help a person live is to address the societal factors that make them want to die.

A harrowing intellectual and emotional odyssey marked by remarkable clarity and compassion, Better is a tour through the seductive darkness of death and a life-affirming memoir. Arianna touches on suicide's public fallout and its intensely private origins as she searches for answers to the profound question: How do we get better for good?

Review Quotes

"In Better, Arianna Rebolini writes with awe-inducing clarity, emotional honesty, and intellectual rigor, taking on the immense complexity of suicide and the profound questions it raises. With piercing and deeply personal insight, she reframes the experience of motherhood, exploring how the specter of suicide can shape and fracture a mother's sense of self. There are readers for whom this may become the most important book they ever read." -- Chloé Cooper Jones, author of Easy Beauty: A Memoir

"Arianna Rebolini's Better is unlike any memoir I've ever read. It's part cultural commentary, part research, part confessional. Above all, it's brutally candid and features page-turning anecdotes about her own late-night, early-morning, mid-day episodes of staggering despair. It's also a strangely and beautifully optimistic reverie on coming clean about our darkest and most intimate struggles while slowly coming to terms with the idea that we might possibly be worthy of love, help, and...life." -- Hannah Pittard, author of We Are Too Many

"Better is an essential memoir. Part literary analysis of suicidality, part life analysis, Rebolini offers an incisive and necessary look into life of managing mental illness. The writing is intimate, revealing, and destigmatizing in a way that has long been necessary and too often avoided. The result is no simple memoir. Beautiful, propulsive and revealing, Rebolini's approach to her subject is transformative. Better is an act of service to those who have not yet felt seen or considered in discussions around mental health and suicidality. It's a rare book that serves both as a relief and a rallying cry." -- Erika Swyler, author of We Lived on the Horizon

"Better is a beautifully lucid and generous exploration of suicidality, deftly zooming in on intimate moments within the author's life, and out to the systemic failures that decimate communities and leave us all at risk. Rebolini interrogates the linear notion of 'getting better, ' courageously asking how we might learn to live with the entirety of ourselves, including mental illness and suicide--while treating these painful topics with incredible sensitivity and curiosity. This is a deeply timely and tender book." -- Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility

"[Better] is both an act of defiant self-expression--an insistence on vulnerability over shame--and an academic exploration that asks seriously: 'What is making us want to die?'" -- Chicago Review of Books

"A brave narrative of radical empathy both for oneself and for others confronting the darkest darkness." -- Kirkus Reviews