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Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die – A Gutsy Exploration of Suicidal Depression, Family Legacy, and Survival
A gutsy, riveting memoir that intimately explores suicide, its legacy in families, and the often cyclical, crooked path of recovery.
Why do so many people choose death—and take their lives by their own hands? How could anyone ever begin to understand what it feels like to want to die?
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 the birth of her first child. Yet the pull of suicide was still there. One night, during bath time, as her young son Theo lined the tub with toy cars, she began calculating how many pills she’d have to down to effectively end her life.
In Better, Arianna interweaves the story of her monthlong 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 life-threatening affliction. To understand 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. Then her own brother became institutionalized, and Arianna realized that all of the patterns and trenchant insights could not crack the shell of his annihilating depression.
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 how do we get better for good?
Why do so many people choose death—and take their lives by their own hands? How could anyone ever begin to understand what it feels like to want to die?
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 the birth of her first child. Yet the pull of suicide was still there. One night, during bath time, as her young son Theo lined the tub with toy cars, she began calculating how many pills she’d have to down to effectively end her life.
In Better, Arianna interweaves the story of her monthlong 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 life-threatening affliction. To understand 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. Then her own brother became institutionalized, and Arianna realized that all of the patterns and trenchant insights could not crack the shell of his annihilating depression.
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 how do we get better for good?
352 pages, Hardcover
Published April 29, 2025
41 people are currently reading
3924 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
May 7, 2025
This is a book that stays with you long after you turn the last page. A beautiful and deeply affecting story that takes readers through the complexity of living with depression and suicidality. What sets Better apart is the way Arianna delves into the ripple effects her mental health struggle has on her role as a mother and the ones it may have on her son's life. I was particularly impressed by how seamlessly she intertwines personal narrative with academic insight. Arianna also opens up an essential dialogue about the mental health system and reminds us that those who need the most help often aren't able to receive it. I think we need more facilities to help people who are struggling. Even if you have insurance it only pays for a small part of your sessions with a mental health expert. I have been to several over the years to help with my depression and anxiety. I had a traumatic childhood and still deal with it daily. I am doing better day by day as I work with a psychiatric that seems to understand me. I do take medication for depression and anxiety. It is a real struggle to get a medication that will help with your mental health. It is kind of like finding a needle in a haystack. Never give up. I highly recommend this book.
February 25, 2025
In a literary landscape where mental health narratives often conclude with neat resolutions, Arianna Rebolini's Better refuses such simplistic closure. Instead, this gutsy, intellectually rigorous memoir maps the jagged terrain of suicidality with a cartographer's precision and a poet's sensitivity. Rebolini invites readers into the most vulnerable chambers of her mind, chronicling her relationship with suicidal ideation—from childhood imaginings with a plastic knife to composing goodbye letters to her husband and young son while they slept nearby.
What distinguishes Better from other mental health memoirs is Rebolini's refusal to package her experience into a redemptive narrative arc. She eschews the "I was sick but now I'm cured" formula for something messier but infinitely more honest: the recognition that recovery isn't a destination but a winding path with unexpected detours and occasional dead ends.
The Intellectual Pursuit of Understanding Self-Destruction
Rebolini's approach is simultaneously intimate and scholarly. Following her hospitalization for suicidal ideation in 2017, she embarks on an investigation of famous suicides—poring over the journals of Sylvia Plath, the letters of Virginia Woolf, and the writings of David Foster Wallace. Her research isn't merely academic; it's existential, driven by the impossible need to understand what happens in that fatal moment between wanting to die and acting on it.
"I spent most of those hours, much of those days, sleeping or crying," she writes of the aftermath of revealing a significant debt she'd hidden from her therapist. "Twice I emailed Elizabeth after sessions to tell her I could sense she was angry with me, and that it was becoming clear that this wasn't working."
This passage exemplifies Rebolini's ability to capture the tortured logic of depression—how it distorts perception and magnifies shame. Throughout the memoir, she demonstrates remarkable self-awareness while simultaneously showing how depression can obliterate that very faculty.
Between Life and Death: The Liminal Space of Suicidality
One of the book's most compelling concepts is what Rebolini and her friends call "The Airlock"—a metaphor for the state of being neither fully committed to living nor dying. This liminal space becomes a central motif as she explores the experience of chronic suicidality. Drawing on writer hannah baer's concept of the "trans girl suicide museum," Rebolini considers suicidality not as a momentary crisis but as a space one inhabits, sometimes for decades.
"I've spent most of my life in a protracted negotiation between living and dying, striving for an impossible objectivity that would make the answer clear," she writes. This framing offers readers a new language for understanding suicidality as something more complex than a binary decision—it's a state of being, a relationship with one's own mortality that ebbs and flows but never fully disappears.
Family Legacies: The Inheritance of Darkness
The memoir gains additional depth when Rebolini shifts focus to her brother Jordan's hospitalization for suicidal depression. This parallel story transforms Better from a personal account into an exploration of mental illness as family legacy. As she watches her brother insist that he must die, Rebolini confronts the limitations of her own theories about recovery.
"I was terrified of my brother's enduring wish for death, but intellectualizing it subdued that fear," she writes. "That was all it did. These abstractions and hypothetical exercises failed to move Jordan even an inch."
This revelation marks a crucial turning point in the narrative. Rebolini begins to understand that the philosophical frameworks she's constructed to make sense of her own suicidality offer little comfort to someone in the depths of despair. The intellectual pursuit of understanding suicide, while valuable, cannot replace the raw human need for connection and care.
The Failure of Systems: When Society Makes Life Unbearable
In the later chapters, Rebolini widens her lens to examine how societal factors contribute to the desire to die. Drawing on the work of economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, she explores how capitalism, inadequate healthcare, and workplace dehumanization create what they call "deaths of despair."
Her critique of the American healthcare system is particularly incisive. She details her own Kafkaesque struggle to navigate insurance coverage for mental health treatment, exposing the cruel irony of a system that makes accessing care nearly impossible for those who need it most. This section transforms Better from a personal memoir into a powerful indictment of structural failures that exacerbate mental illness.
Motherhood and the Fear of Transmission
Perhaps the most poignant thread running through Better is Rebolini's relationship with her son, Theo. She wrestles with the fear of passing her depression to him, watching anxiously for any signs of the same sensitivity that marks her and her brother.
"For months he'd been deep in his most intense fascination: city buses," she writes, capturing the tender specificity of her child's personality. These moments of maternal observation are juxtaposed with darker reflections on what it means to bring a child into existence knowing the genetic predisposition to mental illness they might inherit.
This tension culminates in a powerful scene where Theo asks about death and the afterlife. Rebolini navigates the conversation with remarkable honesty and care, revealing how parenthood has both complicated and enriched her relationship with mortality.
Stylistic Achievements and Occasional Missteps
Rebolini's prose is sharp, introspective, and occasionally lyrical. She moves fluidly between narrative scenes, philosophical inquiry, and cultural analysis. Her ability to articulate the most nebulous aspects of depression—the way it distorts time, erodes identity, and corrupts relationships—is one of the book's greatest strengths.
At times, however, the intellectual scaffolding threatens to overwhelm the emotional core. The sections examining literary suicides occasionally feel like scholarly digressions rather than integral parts of her personal story. While these analyses demonstrate Rebolini's erudition, they sometimes create emotional distance just when the reader craves greater intimacy.
Additionally, some readers might find the cyclical nature of the narrative frustrating. Rebolini repeatedly cycles through hope, disillusionment, and despair, which accurately reflects the experience of chronic depression but can feel repetitive in literary form. However, this structural choice also reinforces one of the memoir's central insights: that recovery is rarely linear.
Comparison to Other Works in the Genre
Better exists in conversation with other notable memoirs about mental illness, particularly:
- Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, which similarly blends personal experience with scholarly inquiry
- Donald Antrim's One Friday in April, another memoir that reframes our understanding of suicidality
- Miriam Toews' novel All My Puny Sorrows, which Rebolini references directly in exploring the ethics of assisted suicide
While this is Rebolini's first memoir, she previously co-authored the novel Public Relations with Katie Heaney, which she mentions briefly in the text. Better represents a significant departure from her earlier work, showcasing her range as a writer and her willingness to engage with the most challenging material.
Final Assessment: A Necessary Addition to Mental Health Literature
Despite its occasional missteps, Better makes a vital contribution to our understanding of depression, suicidality, and recovery. Rebolini resists the temptation to offer easy answers or inspirational platitudes. Instead, she honors the complexity of mental illness and the many factors—biological, psychological, social, and economic—that contribute to it.
The memoir's greatest achievement is its refusal to separate the personal from the political. By connecting her individual suffering to broader systems of oppression and neglect, Rebolini offers a framework for understanding mental illness that is both deeply intimate and structurally aware.
Key Strengths:
- Unflinching honesty about the cyclical nature of depression
- Sophisticated analysis of how capitalism and healthcare failures exacerbate mental illness
- Powerful exploration of mental illness as family legacy
- Nuanced portrayal of parenthood amid chronic suicidality
- Compelling reframing of suicidality as a space one inhabits rather than a momentary crisis
Areas for Improvement:
- Occasional scholarly digressions that create emotional distance
- Some repetitive cyclical patterns in the narrative structure
- A few underdeveloped threads, particularly around workplace experiences
Closing Thoughts: An Essential Read Despite Its Imperfections
Better by Arianna Rebolini doesn't offer the comfort of a neat resolution or the reassurance that suffering always has meaning. Instead, it provides something more valuable: the recognition that some wounds never fully heal, that recovery is ongoing, and that sometimes the most we can do is wait—for ourselves or for those we love—to want to keep living.
As I turned the final pages of the advance reader copy that arrived unexpectedly in my mailbox (like a message in a bottle from someone who understands the darkest corners of human experience), I found myself grateful for Rebolini's willingness to venture into territory many writers avoid. Her courage in confronting the unspeakable creates space for readers to acknowledge their own struggles without shame.
For anyone who has experienced depression, loved someone with suicidal ideation, or simply sought to understand this most taboo of human experiences, Better provides not answers but company—the assurance that even in our darkest moments, we are not alone. And sometimes, as Rebolini so powerfully demonstrates, that is enough to keep us here.
What distinguishes Better from other mental health memoirs is Rebolini's refusal to package her experience into a redemptive narrative arc. She eschews the "I was sick but now I'm cured" formula for something messier but infinitely more honest: the recognition that recovery isn't a destination but a winding path with unexpected detours and occasional dead ends.
The Intellectual Pursuit of Understanding Self-Destruction
Rebolini's approach is simultaneously intimate and scholarly. Following her hospitalization for suicidal ideation in 2017, she embarks on an investigation of famous suicides—poring over the journals of Sylvia Plath, the letters of Virginia Woolf, and the writings of David Foster Wallace. Her research isn't merely academic; it's existential, driven by the impossible need to understand what happens in that fatal moment between wanting to die and acting on it.
"I spent most of those hours, much of those days, sleeping or crying," she writes of the aftermath of revealing a significant debt she'd hidden from her therapist. "Twice I emailed Elizabeth after sessions to tell her I could sense she was angry with me, and that it was becoming clear that this wasn't working."
This passage exemplifies Rebolini's ability to capture the tortured logic of depression—how it distorts perception and magnifies shame. Throughout the memoir, she demonstrates remarkable self-awareness while simultaneously showing how depression can obliterate that very faculty.
Between Life and Death: The Liminal Space of Suicidality
One of the book's most compelling concepts is what Rebolini and her friends call "The Airlock"—a metaphor for the state of being neither fully committed to living nor dying. This liminal space becomes a central motif as she explores the experience of chronic suicidality. Drawing on writer hannah baer's concept of the "trans girl suicide museum," Rebolini considers suicidality not as a momentary crisis but as a space one inhabits, sometimes for decades.
"I've spent most of my life in a protracted negotiation between living and dying, striving for an impossible objectivity that would make the answer clear," she writes. This framing offers readers a new language for understanding suicidality as something more complex than a binary decision—it's a state of being, a relationship with one's own mortality that ebbs and flows but never fully disappears.
Family Legacies: The Inheritance of Darkness
The memoir gains additional depth when Rebolini shifts focus to her brother Jordan's hospitalization for suicidal depression. This parallel story transforms Better from a personal account into an exploration of mental illness as family legacy. As she watches her brother insist that he must die, Rebolini confronts the limitations of her own theories about recovery.
"I was terrified of my brother's enduring wish for death, but intellectualizing it subdued that fear," she writes. "That was all it did. These abstractions and hypothetical exercises failed to move Jordan even an inch."
This revelation marks a crucial turning point in the narrative. Rebolini begins to understand that the philosophical frameworks she's constructed to make sense of her own suicidality offer little comfort to someone in the depths of despair. The intellectual pursuit of understanding suicide, while valuable, cannot replace the raw human need for connection and care.
The Failure of Systems: When Society Makes Life Unbearable
In the later chapters, Rebolini widens her lens to examine how societal factors contribute to the desire to die. Drawing on the work of economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, she explores how capitalism, inadequate healthcare, and workplace dehumanization create what they call "deaths of despair."
Her critique of the American healthcare system is particularly incisive. She details her own Kafkaesque struggle to navigate insurance coverage for mental health treatment, exposing the cruel irony of a system that makes accessing care nearly impossible for those who need it most. This section transforms Better from a personal memoir into a powerful indictment of structural failures that exacerbate mental illness.
Motherhood and the Fear of Transmission
Perhaps the most poignant thread running through Better is Rebolini's relationship with her son, Theo. She wrestles with the fear of passing her depression to him, watching anxiously for any signs of the same sensitivity that marks her and her brother.
"For months he'd been deep in his most intense fascination: city buses," she writes, capturing the tender specificity of her child's personality. These moments of maternal observation are juxtaposed with darker reflections on what it means to bring a child into existence knowing the genetic predisposition to mental illness they might inherit.
This tension culminates in a powerful scene where Theo asks about death and the afterlife. Rebolini navigates the conversation with remarkable honesty and care, revealing how parenthood has both complicated and enriched her relationship with mortality.
Stylistic Achievements and Occasional Missteps
Rebolini's prose is sharp, introspective, and occasionally lyrical. She moves fluidly between narrative scenes, philosophical inquiry, and cultural analysis. Her ability to articulate the most nebulous aspects of depression—the way it distorts time, erodes identity, and corrupts relationships—is one of the book's greatest strengths.
At times, however, the intellectual scaffolding threatens to overwhelm the emotional core. The sections examining literary suicides occasionally feel like scholarly digressions rather than integral parts of her personal story. While these analyses demonstrate Rebolini's erudition, they sometimes create emotional distance just when the reader craves greater intimacy.
Additionally, some readers might find the cyclical nature of the narrative frustrating. Rebolini repeatedly cycles through hope, disillusionment, and despair, which accurately reflects the experience of chronic depression but can feel repetitive in literary form. However, this structural choice also reinforces one of the memoir's central insights: that recovery is rarely linear.
Comparison to Other Works in the Genre
Better exists in conversation with other notable memoirs about mental illness, particularly:
- Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, which similarly blends personal experience with scholarly inquiry
- Donald Antrim's One Friday in April, another memoir that reframes our understanding of suicidality
- Miriam Toews' novel All My Puny Sorrows, which Rebolini references directly in exploring the ethics of assisted suicide
While this is Rebolini's first memoir, she previously co-authored the novel Public Relations with Katie Heaney, which she mentions briefly in the text. Better represents a significant departure from her earlier work, showcasing her range as a writer and her willingness to engage with the most challenging material.
Final Assessment: A Necessary Addition to Mental Health Literature
Despite its occasional missteps, Better makes a vital contribution to our understanding of depression, suicidality, and recovery. Rebolini resists the temptation to offer easy answers or inspirational platitudes. Instead, she honors the complexity of mental illness and the many factors—biological, psychological, social, and economic—that contribute to it.
The memoir's greatest achievement is its refusal to separate the personal from the political. By connecting her individual suffering to broader systems of oppression and neglect, Rebolini offers a framework for understanding mental illness that is both deeply intimate and structurally aware.
Key Strengths:
- Unflinching honesty about the cyclical nature of depression
- Sophisticated analysis of how capitalism and healthcare failures exacerbate mental illness
- Powerful exploration of mental illness as family legacy
- Nuanced portrayal of parenthood amid chronic suicidality
- Compelling reframing of suicidality as a space one inhabits rather than a momentary crisis
Areas for Improvement:
- Occasional scholarly digressions that create emotional distance
- Some repetitive cyclical patterns in the narrative structure
- A few underdeveloped threads, particularly around workplace experiences
Closing Thoughts: An Essential Read Despite Its Imperfections
Better by Arianna Rebolini doesn't offer the comfort of a neat resolution or the reassurance that suffering always has meaning. Instead, it provides something more valuable: the recognition that some wounds never fully heal, that recovery is ongoing, and that sometimes the most we can do is wait—for ourselves or for those we love—to want to keep living.
As I turned the final pages of the advance reader copy that arrived unexpectedly in my mailbox (like a message in a bottle from someone who understands the darkest corners of human experience), I found myself grateful for Rebolini's willingness to venture into territory many writers avoid. Her courage in confronting the unspeakable creates space for readers to acknowledge their own struggles without shame.
For anyone who has experienced depression, loved someone with suicidal ideation, or simply sought to understand this most taboo of human experiences, Better provides not answers but company—the assurance that even in our darkest moments, we are not alone. And sometimes, as Rebolini so powerfully demonstrates, that is enough to keep us here.
February 6, 2025
ARC for review. To be published April 29, 2025.
2 stars.
DNF at 41%
Though I did not finish the book I felt I read enough to give it a rating. This is meant to be a memoir of suicide. The author wanted to kill herself when she was nineteen, but is does not appear she made a serious attempt as she spoke to a friend and took herself to the emergency room. After a brief period on the hospital’s psychology ward and years of therapy and despite a good marriage, a fulfilling job and the birth of a child she became suicidal again when she was in debt as an adult.
Her brother seems to have had a far more difficult time, spending years rotating in and out of treatment centers, often expressing a desire to die. It appears doctors have never been able to get him to a point of equilibrium that has lasted any significant period of time.
I was interested in the book when the author talked about herself or her brother (but I was not at all sure how I felt about her laying her brother’s issues before the public. He appears profoundly disturbed and I wonder about issues of consent with him, and whether, at the time she got it, he might have been so deeply within his mental illness that he was unsure about what he was doing? I don’t know. She just…there’s so MUCH.
But, anyway, at least those parts were good. But often she goes deeply into her thoughts (and those of others) about Plath and Woolf and those sections draggggggged. She notes, “Most writing on suicide…arrives and is possible only in moments when the writer is outside danger, from places of safety, lacking the immense and full access to the urgency felt with in the state of suicidality (is that a word? Because she uses it a LOT.) it is examining, so it is weakened by distance. Their perspectives necessarily tend toward the philosophical, spiritual, scientific.” So, you know, she explains away why her book might be boring.
Still boring, though. I found myself dreading it every time I picked it up again, so I was kind to myself and just let it go. I hope for many good things for her brother.
2 stars.
DNF at 41%
Though I did not finish the book I felt I read enough to give it a rating. This is meant to be a memoir of suicide. The author wanted to kill herself when she was nineteen, but is does not appear she made a serious attempt as she spoke to a friend and took herself to the emergency room. After a brief period on the hospital’s psychology ward and years of therapy and despite a good marriage, a fulfilling job and the birth of a child she became suicidal again when she was in debt as an adult.
Her brother seems to have had a far more difficult time, spending years rotating in and out of treatment centers, often expressing a desire to die. It appears doctors have never been able to get him to a point of equilibrium that has lasted any significant period of time.
I was interested in the book when the author talked about herself or her brother (but I was not at all sure how I felt about her laying her brother’s issues before the public. He appears profoundly disturbed and I wonder about issues of consent with him, and whether, at the time she got it, he might have been so deeply within his mental illness that he was unsure about what he was doing? I don’t know. She just…there’s so MUCH.
But, anyway, at least those parts were good. But often she goes deeply into her thoughts (and those of others) about Plath and Woolf and those sections draggggggged. She notes, “Most writing on suicide…arrives and is possible only in moments when the writer is outside danger, from places of safety, lacking the immense and full access to the urgency felt with in the state of suicidality (is that a word? Because she uses it a LOT.) it is examining, so it is weakened by distance. Their perspectives necessarily tend toward the philosophical, spiritual, scientific.” So, you know, she explains away why her book might be boring.
Still boring, though. I found myself dreading it every time I picked it up again, so I was kind to myself and just let it go. I hope for many good things for her brother.
January 21, 2025
What. A. Stunner. This book is brilliant and beautiful, an elegant interweaving of memoir and a sprawling research quest to understand suicide better. It’s full of compassion and tenacity, so honest but gentle, a surprisingly lovely read for the subject matter. One of the best memoirs I’ve read in a very long time.
February 14, 2025
Arianna Rebolini's Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die is a beautiful and deeply affecting story that takes readers through the complexity of living with depression and suicidality, the messy process of healing, and the reality that "healed" doesn't really exist.
What sets Better apart is the way Arianna delves into the ripple effects her mental health struggle has on her role as a mother and the ones it may have on her son's life. Her exploration of the conflicting feelings surrounding what—and when—to share with her son about difficult topics like death feels both delicate and deeply honest.
I was particularly impressed by how seamlessly she intertwines personal narrative with academic insight. The inclusion of research on suicide and reflections from literary figures enriches the book, offering a broader context to her personal struggles. Arianna also opens up an essential dialogue about the mental health system and reminds us that those who need the most help often aren't able to receive it.
This is a book that stays with you long after you turn the last page: heartbreaking, hopeful, and deeply human. I can't recommend it enough.
What sets Better apart is the way Arianna delves into the ripple effects her mental health struggle has on her role as a mother and the ones it may have on her son's life. Her exploration of the conflicting feelings surrounding what—and when—to share with her son about difficult topics like death feels both delicate and deeply honest.
I was particularly impressed by how seamlessly she intertwines personal narrative with academic insight. The inclusion of research on suicide and reflections from literary figures enriches the book, offering a broader context to her personal struggles. Arianna also opens up an essential dialogue about the mental health system and reminds us that those who need the most help often aren't able to receive it.
This is a book that stays with you long after you turn the last page: heartbreaking, hopeful, and deeply human. I can't recommend it enough.
June 6, 2025
Ever since I was six years old, I’ve felt hunted. I can’t really explain it, but I’ve always felt a sense of impending doom and danger. It’s an instinct I still have to quiet now. Though I’ve taken anti-anxiety meds in the past to regulate my anxieties, I got off Lexapro after it made me feel foggy all the time. Now I just have to live with my mind, and sometimes it’s pure torture.
I’ve never had to fight suicidal thoughts like the author of BETTER, but given the intrusive thoughts of anxiety I’ve battled my entire life, I had a lot of compassion for the author throughout my reading of this book. She has clearly suffered a lot, and so has her brother. It makes me wonder about the value of brain scans for suicidal individuals after they’ve passed on. I truly believe some people are wired to struggle with life more than others, and this memoir strips the shame of having such an experience. The author also writes of the difficulties getting help when most therapists don’t take insurance. She went into debt trying to get help, then wondered if she’d just be better off dead than alive. How sad that this is what it means to be human for so many people rhese days, but here we are. Though the topic is dark, there’s a lot of humor and charm in these pages as well. I truly feel for the author. I know what it’s like to have an anxious brain, so I can only imagine how hard it must be to hear your own voice constantly tell you to unalive yourself.
I’ve never had to fight suicidal thoughts like the author of BETTER, but given the intrusive thoughts of anxiety I’ve battled my entire life, I had a lot of compassion for the author throughout my reading of this book. She has clearly suffered a lot, and so has her brother. It makes me wonder about the value of brain scans for suicidal individuals after they’ve passed on. I truly believe some people are wired to struggle with life more than others, and this memoir strips the shame of having such an experience. The author also writes of the difficulties getting help when most therapists don’t take insurance. She went into debt trying to get help, then wondered if she’d just be better off dead than alive. How sad that this is what it means to be human for so many people rhese days, but here we are. Though the topic is dark, there’s a lot of humor and charm in these pages as well. I truly feel for the author. I know what it’s like to have an anxious brain, so I can only imagine how hard it must be to hear your own voice constantly tell you to unalive yourself.
Read
August 15, 2025(Disclaimer: I don't give star ratings to memoirs)
This was a heavy memoir about suicide ideation and how that looks and feels like for different people. The author struggles herself with thoughts of suicide and her fluctuating feelings about it.
Although heavy, I also found this very insightful. The correlation of imposter syndrome in regards to whether an attempt was good enough to count as an attempt, or whether it would be seen as attention seeking was sadly for me extremely relatable.
There was also discussion as to what our true reasoning is when we ask someone to not commit. Is it because we truly believe their life will get better even though they are suffering at the moment, or is it because we would suffer without them?
Interspersed with snippets of different books/stories of suicide I found this heartbreaking, tragically relatable, and so very profound.
Not something to read lightly, but a book I think everyone should pick up.
This was a heavy memoir about suicide ideation and how that looks and feels like for different people. The author struggles herself with thoughts of suicide and her fluctuating feelings about it.
Although heavy, I also found this very insightful. The correlation of imposter syndrome in regards to whether an attempt was good enough to count as an attempt, or whether it would be seen as attention seeking was sadly for me extremely relatable.
There was also discussion as to what our true reasoning is when we ask someone to not commit. Is it because we truly believe their life will get better even though they are suffering at the moment, or is it because we would suffer without them?
Interspersed with snippets of different books/stories of suicide I found this heartbreaking, tragically relatable, and so very profound.
Not something to read lightly, but a book I think everyone should pick up.
July 13, 2025
I really appreciated the subject matter of this book. It's bold and informative, not something people do often in their memoirs. However, I didn't particularly enjoy this book for several reasons.
Pros:
✅ Extremely raw and vulnerable. You can tell she has been through it.
✅ Covers a lot of aspects and is informative.
✅ Bold and moving.
✅ The parts about her family and their dynamics.
✅ Conveying hope in a realistic manner.
Cons:
❌ The author uses a lot of other people's works such as Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. I did not particularly connect and it created distance between the reader and author.
❌ Mainly because of the previous, there was a lot of repetition in concepts without adding much.
❌ It felt too long. I would've liked it more if it was more succinct.
Overall, this is a difficylt read and cannot be a pageturner. I learned a bit, but I was hoping more from the memoir. It's not a book I would recommend because the subject is quite dark.
2.5/5
Pros:
✅ Extremely raw and vulnerable. You can tell she has been through it.
✅ Covers a lot of aspects and is informative.
✅ Bold and moving.
✅ The parts about her family and their dynamics.
✅ Conveying hope in a realistic manner.
Cons:
❌ The author uses a lot of other people's works such as Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. I did not particularly connect and it created distance between the reader and author.
❌ Mainly because of the previous, there was a lot of repetition in concepts without adding much.
❌ It felt too long. I would've liked it more if it was more succinct.
Overall, this is a difficylt read and cannot be a pageturner. I learned a bit, but I was hoping more from the memoir. It's not a book I would recommend because the subject is quite dark.
2.5/5
May 7, 2025
This is such a heartfelt and thought provoking book about suicide and getting better after a mental health episode. She decided to study the leading up period to the tragic deaths by suicide of several literary giants such as Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, Ozamu Dazai, and a few others to see how they ended up they way they did. She also bravely shared her own and some of her loved ones’s struggles with it.
It is deeply relatable book if you have ever struggled with it yourself or has had a loved one going through it. She even discussed about the role of assisted suicide and its impacts which I rarely ever come across in books about suicide before. I highly recommend it!
It is deeply relatable book if you have ever struggled with it yourself or has had a loved one going through it. She even discussed about the role of assisted suicide and its impacts which I rarely ever come across in books about suicide before. I highly recommend it!
May 5, 2025
I feel so seen and heard by this. I’ve always been in that dance of up and downs when it comes to thinking about suicide , seeing the way it affects everyone around me, and what it actually means for me if I did go through with it. Although this can be seen as a deeply troubling book, I see it as someone telling about family, friends, and their owns struggle with mental health and suicide. The quotes from other authors and historians make it interesting, seeing other points of views on suicide throughout history.
June 2, 2025
Now hold on a minute, y'all, lemme tell ya 'bout this here book, "Better" by Arianna Rebolini. And lemme tell ya, this ain't no sunshine and rainbows kinda read. Nah, this here book, it's somethin' else.
A Real Tough Read, But One You Gotta Read
This here gal, Arianna, she lays it all out, bare and ugly, 'bout tryin' to kill herself. Can you imagine? Just thinkin' 'bout it makes my stomach knot up. And she ain't just talkin' 'bout a bad day, neither. She's talkin' 'bout years of it, and even after she's got a kid and a good job, that dark cloud, it's still hoverin'. Makes ya wonder, don't it? How can someone wanna die when they got so much to live for? This book, it tries to get inside that, even if it's a mighty uncomfortable place to be.
She goes way back, too, talkin' 'bout bein' a little tyke and already havin' them dark thoughts. And her brother, bless his heart, he goes through it too. It ain't just her, see? It's like a sickness that runs in the family. She reads all these books by folks who done killed themselves, tryin' to figure it out. She wants to know what happens in that last second, that moment between thinkin' 'bout it and doin' it. And the worst part? She wants to know what happens if they change their mind, but it's too late. Man, that just breaks your heart, don't it?
No Easy Answers, But Lots of Heart.
This ain't no feel-good story with a happy ending all tied up in a bow. Nah, it's messy and sad, and it don't give you all the answers. But what it does give ya is a peek into somethin' most folks don't wanna talk about. Arianna, she's got guts, writin' this. She ain't afraid to go to them dark places, and she does it with a lot of heart, even when it's hurtin'. She wants to know how folks get better for good, and even if she don't find all the answers, she sure makes ya think.
So if you're lookin' for somethin' that'll make ya think, somethin' that's real and raw, even if it's tough to swallow, then "Better" might just be the book for you. Just don't say I didn't warn ya, it ain't exactly a picnic in the park. But it's worth it, I reckon. It really is.
I give it 5 catfish outta 5.
A Real Tough Read, But One You Gotta Read
This here gal, Arianna, she lays it all out, bare and ugly, 'bout tryin' to kill herself. Can you imagine? Just thinkin' 'bout it makes my stomach knot up. And she ain't just talkin' 'bout a bad day, neither. She's talkin' 'bout years of it, and even after she's got a kid and a good job, that dark cloud, it's still hoverin'. Makes ya wonder, don't it? How can someone wanna die when they got so much to live for? This book, it tries to get inside that, even if it's a mighty uncomfortable place to be.
She goes way back, too, talkin' 'bout bein' a little tyke and already havin' them dark thoughts. And her brother, bless his heart, he goes through it too. It ain't just her, see? It's like a sickness that runs in the family. She reads all these books by folks who done killed themselves, tryin' to figure it out. She wants to know what happens in that last second, that moment between thinkin' 'bout it and doin' it. And the worst part? She wants to know what happens if they change their mind, but it's too late. Man, that just breaks your heart, don't it?
No Easy Answers, But Lots of Heart.
This ain't no feel-good story with a happy ending all tied up in a bow. Nah, it's messy and sad, and it don't give you all the answers. But what it does give ya is a peek into somethin' most folks don't wanna talk about. Arianna, she's got guts, writin' this. She ain't afraid to go to them dark places, and she does it with a lot of heart, even when it's hurtin'. She wants to know how folks get better for good, and even if she don't find all the answers, she sure makes ya think.
So if you're lookin' for somethin' that'll make ya think, somethin' that's real and raw, even if it's tough to swallow, then "Better" might just be the book for you. Just don't say I didn't warn ya, it ain't exactly a picnic in the park. But it's worth it, I reckon. It really is.
I give it 5 catfish outta 5.
August 16, 2025
like having an extended conversation with a good friend. the pacing of the book is gentle, with a reflective approach to the subject matter that arrives at intelligent points of insight. the part that blew my mind was when the author observed the splitting into 'aggressor' and 'victim' implicit in saying 'so-and-so killed themselves,' something i had not before considered and so finely noticed!!
a kind and a loving book, one committed to being there with the thing we most prefer to shut away. i hesitate to call it a confrontation with death, it's less that fighting rhetoric she writes about and more a befriending of the unpleasant for the purpose of getting to know it, cozying up to the risk it imputes to the seeker and inviting familiarity. a friend of mine just committed suicide, and having attempted myself multiple times it brought up a lot for me--as the author notes, the people around those who have done so are most at risk of committing themselves. this book found me at the right time. if nothing else, and there is 'else' but to distill my takeaways: it is comforting to see this written and to wade into another's parallel experience. so thank you Arianna Rebolini for this book, i am grateful you shared it with us.
p.s. also i was reading this in public somewhere near my house once, there was a farmer's market nearby. two guys came and sat down near me, and as i read i cried quite a bit, jiggling my leg with attendant anxiety and engagement and only looking up from the book to wipe away tears. as they were leaving i heard them say "it would be weird if [she] just stayed there," "yeah. creepy." and it gave me a lot of satisfaction to imagine them talking about me as if i was some mutual visitation they were experiencing together, a ghost. i would like to haunt ppl. this brush w death also made me appreciate having a body before it unwinds, so,,, let's try not to return to the aether so soon, at least not before getting some use out of it
RIP Mau Le Ha
a kind and a loving book, one committed to being there with the thing we most prefer to shut away. i hesitate to call it a confrontation with death, it's less that fighting rhetoric she writes about and more a befriending of the unpleasant for the purpose of getting to know it, cozying up to the risk it imputes to the seeker and inviting familiarity. a friend of mine just committed suicide, and having attempted myself multiple times it brought up a lot for me--as the author notes, the people around those who have done so are most at risk of committing themselves. this book found me at the right time. if nothing else, and there is 'else' but to distill my takeaways: it is comforting to see this written and to wade into another's parallel experience. so thank you Arianna Rebolini for this book, i am grateful you shared it with us.
p.s. also i was reading this in public somewhere near my house once, there was a farmer's market nearby. two guys came and sat down near me, and as i read i cried quite a bit, jiggling my leg with attendant anxiety and engagement and only looking up from the book to wipe away tears. as they were leaving i heard them say "it would be weird if [she] just stayed there," "yeah. creepy." and it gave me a lot of satisfaction to imagine them talking about me as if i was some mutual visitation they were experiencing together, a ghost. i would like to haunt ppl. this brush w death also made me appreciate having a body before it unwinds, so,,, let's try not to return to the aether so soon, at least not before getting some use out of it
RIP Mau Le Ha
December 25, 2025
Synopsis:
Arianna has struggled with suicidality for as long as she can remember. Though she has had success in her life, created a family, and has attended therapy for a decade, she can’t always keep her thoughts at bay. After one particularly difficult night where she wrote goodbye letters to her husband and child while they slept mere feet from her, she decided to take a deep look into the cause and lead up to suicidality. She began looking through her personal journals, considering family members who were also struggling, and looking into famous writers who took their own lives. She uses this book as a way to note her findings and theories about why so many people want to die and how we as a society can begin to understand what makes a person choose suicide.
My thoughts:
Being in the field of psychology, suicide is a topic I am familiar with. For as long as I can remember death and dying has been a topic I’ve been interested in from the point of understanding it more. What Arianna does in this book is genius. While she does talk about her own struggles, she truly seeks to understand others who have her same struggles. She looks at family members, personal friends, famous writers, genetics, environment, and many other factors. She talks about how as an adult she can now see some similarities in her struggles and her parents, how her brother continued to struggle and be in pain after several institution stints, and her fear in passing down the struggles to her own son. I think this is an important book to read because it’s more than just a review of studies. It’s written from personal experiences, while including factual statistics, and scientific based theories.
Arianna has struggled with suicidality for as long as she can remember. Though she has had success in her life, created a family, and has attended therapy for a decade, she can’t always keep her thoughts at bay. After one particularly difficult night where she wrote goodbye letters to her husband and child while they slept mere feet from her, she decided to take a deep look into the cause and lead up to suicidality. She began looking through her personal journals, considering family members who were also struggling, and looking into famous writers who took their own lives. She uses this book as a way to note her findings and theories about why so many people want to die and how we as a society can begin to understand what makes a person choose suicide.
My thoughts:
Being in the field of psychology, suicide is a topic I am familiar with. For as long as I can remember death and dying has been a topic I’ve been interested in from the point of understanding it more. What Arianna does in this book is genius. While she does talk about her own struggles, she truly seeks to understand others who have her same struggles. She looks at family members, personal friends, famous writers, genetics, environment, and many other factors. She talks about how as an adult she can now see some similarities in her struggles and her parents, how her brother continued to struggle and be in pain after several institution stints, and her fear in passing down the struggles to her own son. I think this is an important book to read because it’s more than just a review of studies. It’s written from personal experiences, while including factual statistics, and scientific based theories.
June 8, 2025
I am mystified by the strength it must take writers like Donald Antrim, Andrew Solomon, Jennifer Senior, and Yiyun Li to write so powerfully, so poignantly about suicide. To plumb the depths of the Black dog and all that it entails. And to do it so vulnerably and with great style. Arriana Rebolini can now be added to this complex canon of genius writers using their gifts to demystify harmful ideas around suicidality.
Rebolini’s prose is clean and sharp. Reading the story of her own battle with depression and constant, debilitating ideations as she juggled freelance life felt all too familiar. But what really shattered me was the family tree of it all, her brother’s despair and his own relationship to suicide, the way her hopelessness impacted her marriage, and her fear that she would pass this sadness on to her son Theo. I’ve never read an account as nuanced or as well written. Rebolini gets it.
As a chronic depressive dealing with my own demons I felt advocated for, not shamed or studied. The writing is telling the truth and the writer is doing her part to shine a light on suicidality and the danger its stigmas. This book is important and I pray it gets the attention and support it deserves. And if it doesn’t, if it doesn't make the bestseller lists or the pay to play book club selections, I hope this author knows that she created something distinct and essential for the despairing mind and the people who love and struggle to understand them.
Rebolini’s prose is clean and sharp. Reading the story of her own battle with depression and constant, debilitating ideations as she juggled freelance life felt all too familiar. But what really shattered me was the family tree of it all, her brother’s despair and his own relationship to suicide, the way her hopelessness impacted her marriage, and her fear that she would pass this sadness on to her son Theo. I’ve never read an account as nuanced or as well written. Rebolini gets it.
As a chronic depressive dealing with my own demons I felt advocated for, not shamed or studied. The writing is telling the truth and the writer is doing her part to shine a light on suicidality and the danger its stigmas. This book is important and I pray it gets the attention and support it deserves. And if it doesn’t, if it doesn't make the bestseller lists or the pay to play book club selections, I hope this author knows that she created something distinct and essential for the despairing mind and the people who love and struggle to understand them.
November 27, 2025
Gorgeous ending!
When this was thought-provoking, it was really thought-provoking: the connection (and distinction?) of personality/identity and chronic mental linness; the helpfulness and sometimes slippery-slope harm of peer support for depression and suicidality; the ethics of endorsing or supporting an adult dying by suicide; and the experience of being chronically mentally ill and choosing to have a child, and raising that child with persistent concerns that the child is developing a mental illness.
Per my own idiosyncratic interests, I didn't enjoy the literature history or the descriptions of other literary works that deal with suicidality. It was also infuriating (in, I think, a good way) to be "inside the author's head" a bit as she continued to be quite stuck inside her head/focused on herself (which is, of course, part and parcel with depression), and pouring over detailed literary descriptions/journaling of depression symptoms. When Rebolini acknowledged this, that was great - but, still tough and a long-time coming.
Listened on audio while driving and flying; good narration by the author!
When this was thought-provoking, it was really thought-provoking: the connection (and distinction?) of personality/identity and chronic mental linness; the helpfulness and sometimes slippery-slope harm of peer support for depression and suicidality; the ethics of endorsing or supporting an adult dying by suicide; and the experience of being chronically mentally ill and choosing to have a child, and raising that child with persistent concerns that the child is developing a mental illness.
Per my own idiosyncratic interests, I didn't enjoy the literature history or the descriptions of other literary works that deal with suicidality. It was also infuriating (in, I think, a good way) to be "inside the author's head" a bit as she continued to be quite stuck inside her head/focused on herself (which is, of course, part and parcel with depression), and pouring over detailed literary descriptions/journaling of depression symptoms. When Rebolini acknowledged this, that was great - but, still tough and a long-time coming.
Listened on audio while driving and flying; good narration by the author!
June 21, 2025
The reason this fell flat for me was its structure—Rebolini’s weaving her own story between large sections on the quintessential works of artists and writers who have committed suicide. The works she included and expanded upon established a basic interpretation and analysis, especially when considering the subject of ending one own’s life and the legacy surrounding the surviving art…Plath, Sexton, Woolf, Wallace, Levé…etc.
To me, it seems there is nothing new is revealed through the inclusion of these works from a literary or memoir perspective.
I appreciated the author’s own/familial experiences and wish that would have been the only narrative in the book. This book, with such a beautiful cover—
To me, it seems there is nothing new is revealed through the inclusion of these works from a literary or memoir perspective.
I appreciated the author’s own/familial experiences and wish that would have been the only narrative in the book. This book, with such a beautiful cover—
October 6, 2025
4.5☆ but I will be rounding down.
I'm honestly speechless. This was so captivating and thought-provoking. Rebolini delves deep into the concept of suicidality and honestly, she brings up so many questions that really make you sit and think. I was not expecting her to expose so many works from past artists/authors that centered around their suicide. I am just blown away. I am knocking this down though because I felt conflicted on her insistence on her need to die/acknowledging the fact she must die, and how she obsesses over it but then how she still chose to have a child and now worries about him having the "suicide gene", bringing to light her son's own obsession with death. It really just made me question the "why" every time she brought it up.
I'm honestly speechless. This was so captivating and thought-provoking. Rebolini delves deep into the concept of suicidality and honestly, she brings up so many questions that really make you sit and think. I was not expecting her to expose so many works from past artists/authors that centered around their suicide. I am just blown away. I am knocking this down though because I felt conflicted on her insistence on her need to die/acknowledging the fact she must die, and how she obsesses over it but then how she still chose to have a child and now worries about him having the "suicide gene", bringing to light her son's own obsession with death. It really just made me question the "why" every time she brought it up.
May 30, 2025
This was an interesting one, but I felt like it went downhill halfway through. I very much found the moments of the author reflecting and speaking about her own personal life and experiences to be very interesting. What I felt that dragged was her discussions of Plath, Wolff, and others who have written or discussed suicide in the past. While some discussions that were brought up were really interesting others didn’t hold up.
There were also sections that would veer off like her talking about Amazon and its workers and business practices which really dragged and almost had my eyes glazing over.
There were also sections that would veer off like her talking about Amazon and its workers and business practices which really dragged and almost had my eyes glazing over.
July 20, 2025
I'm not a big memoir fan because I think they often feel too fluffy and neat. This memoir is different - Arianna Rebolini dares to go deep and dark, she dares to be extremely vulnerable, and she dares to wrestle with thoughts, questions, and conclusions that our society often shies away from - but with a tenderness and reflectiveness throughout. I would highly recommend this book for anyone, but especially those who struggle with suicidality, those who love someone who does, and mental health professionals.
June 24, 2025
Excellent writing and fascinating subject matter. I don’t begrudge anyone who feels like they want to escape this planet. I’ve been there. I may be there again. I miss my friend who passed away.
I was good friends with her husband Brendan in college. It’s surreal to read about someone you know in a real deal book, and heartwarming to see he’s still a treasure. Way to be a supportive partner, dude!! We need more Brendans in this world.
I was good friends with her husband Brendan in college. It’s surreal to read about someone you know in a real deal book, and heartwarming to see he’s still a treasure. Way to be a supportive partner, dude!! We need more Brendans in this world.
July 11, 2025
Interesting memoir - very insightful into Arianna's life & thoughts, along with others in the depressive state of mind & how they did (or did not) overcome it. A bit on the heavy side, if you do decide to read it.
August 25, 2025
The parts about her and her brothers life were interesting. Too much time spent talking about authors, poets, or other things.
October 2, 2025
This is the book I've been wanting for decades! Thank you for writing it and giving an honest voice to those of us who've never felt understood before.
October 10, 2025
I appreciated her personal stories more than the analysis interspersed throughout. But ultimately it felt like there wasn’t really enough of either
Read
November 1, 2025DNF
December 12, 2025
Well-written memoir about living with suicidal ideation. Enjoyed the author’s narration of the audiobook.
December 13, 2025
this helped me understand a loved one better. understand why they don't want to leave but why they don't feel like they can stay.
December 24, 2025
I found it too analytical without feeling the intense emotions the author experienced
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