Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die

"[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 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 pro-longed depression, she composed goodbye letters to her husband and son while they slept just feet away.

In Better, Arianna interweaves the story of this 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, to her brother’s own life-threatening affliction. To make sense of this dark desire, Arianna pored over the journals, memoirs, and other 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 brother became institutionalized, Arianna realized that all of the pattern recognition 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 at once 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?