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 Arianna 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 by Arianna Rebolini 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 Arianna 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 by Arianna Rebolini 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 by Arianna Rebolini 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.
