In “Better,” Arianna Rebolini’s searing memoir about depression and suicidality, she explores a question that haunts those who’ve been suicidal but remain alive: “How do you know if you’re better for good?” This deceptively simple query serves as the emotional and intellectual backbone of a work that refuses easy answers or tidy resolutions. Instead, Rebolini invites readers into the messy, nonlinear experience of living with chronic suicidality while raising a child, maintaining a marriage, and attempting to function in a world that often seems designed to exacerbate mental health struggles.
The memoir opens with a gut-punch: Rebolini, a mother to a young son named Theo, calculating whether her death might financially benefit her family more than her continued existence. She has accrued significant debt, including money owed to her therapist, Elizabeth, and feels trapped in a spiral of shame and despair. This unflinching opening establishes the raw honesty that characterizes the entire work—Rebolini refuses to sanitize her darkest thoughts, instead laying them bare with startling clarity.
What follows is an intimate exploration of depression that spans decades, from Rebolini’s childhood through her 2017 hospitalization for suicidal ideation, to her ongoing struggle to remain present for her son. The memoir is not chronological but thematic, moving between time periods with the fluid logic of memory and psychological inquiry. This structure brilliantly mirrors the cyclical nature of depression itself—how the past is never truly past when it comes to mental illness, but rather something that continually informs and shapes the present.
The Museum of Suicide
One of the most striking aspects of “Better” by Arianna Rebolini is Rebolini’s intellectual engagement with the subject of suicide. Rather than treating it solely as a personal struggle, she approaches it as a scholar might, examining writings by famous authors who died by suicide—particularly Sylvia Plath, whose journals become a touchstone throughout the text. She references literary theorists, sociologists, and philosophers who’ve grappled with suicide, creating what she calls, borrowing from transgender writer hannah baer, “the suicide museum”—a space of liminality where the suicidal person dwells.
This analytical approach does not distance readers from the emotional impact of suicidality; instead, it creates a framework for understanding an experience often dismissed as irrational. Rebolini demonstrates how the desire to die can have its own internal logic, particularly in a capitalist society that dehumanizes people and makes bare survival increasingly difficult for many.
Her exploration of the “ugly mask” is particularly insightful. Drawing on Dazai Osamu’s novel “No Longer Human,” she examines how suicidal people often come to believe they are fundamentally different from others, that they lack some essential quality that makes living bearable for everyone else. This alienation becomes a self-reinforcing cycle, pushing them further into isolation.
The Family Inheritance
“Better” by Arianna Rebolini is also deeply concerned with the familial dimensions of mental illness. When Rebolini’s younger brother Jordan is hospitalized for suicidality, their parallel struggles create a terrifying mirror. She writes with palpable fear about the possibility that depression might be passed down to her son Theo, noting all the ways he resembles her brother:
“For nearly as long as Theo has been alive, my family has noted his similarities with Jordan. The same stubborn scowl Jordan wore at five years old, the intensity of his attention, the hypersensitivity—they are there, in Theo, undeniably.”
These family connections extend to her parents as well, particularly her mother, whose anxiety and hoarding tendencies created a chaotic home environment. Rebolini explores her complex feelings toward her mother with remarkable nuance, moving from frustration to empathy as she gradually comes to understand the trauma that shaped her mother’s life.
The memoir avoids simplistic narratives about “breaking cycles” of family dysfunction, instead acknowledging how mental illness can be both inherited and environmentally influenced, yet never fully deterministic. Rebolini poignantly captures the terror of watching someone you love want to die—a fear that, for her, often exceeds her fear of her own suicide.
The Critique of Care
Where “Better” by Arianna Rebolini truly shines is in its unflinching critique of America’s mental healthcare system and broader societal factors that contribute to despair. Rebolini meticulously details the Kafkaesque nightmare of trying to access appropriate mental healthcare through insurance companies that seem designed to deny coverage.
She argues that the skyrocketing “deaths of despair” in America aren’t just a psychological phenomenon but a socioeconomic one, drawing on research by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton. The isolation and dehumanization bred by capitalism, coupled with inadequate healthcare, housing insecurity, and crushing debt, create conditions in which suicide can seem reasonable.
This political analysis never feels preachy or disconnected from Rebolini’s personal story. Rather, she shows how these systems directly impact her life, from her struggles with debt to her experiences in workplace environments that expect productivity despite emotional distress. One particularly compelling section examines her time at BuzzFeed during the COVID-19 pandemic, where corporate language about “prioritizing mental health” rang hollow against expectations of continued productivity amid global crisis.
The Language of Suicide
Rebolini pays special attention to how we talk about suicide, questioning conventional wisdom about terminology and prevention strategies. She challenges the taboo against phrases like “committed suicide,” noting that such linguistic policing often comes from institutions rather than from suicidal people themselves. She writes:
“When we’re struggling, we must trust that others want to help; when we have help to offer, we must trust the struggling person’s buy-in. This trust is a requirement of respect.”
This emphasis on respect extends to her critiques of standard therapeutic approaches. She notes how telling someone “it gets better” can alienate those for whom it hasn’t gotten better, despite multiple treatments and interventions. With her brother Jordan, she eventually reaches the radical conclusion that sometimes the most compassionate approach isn’t to insist recovery is inevitable, but to simply say, “You don’t have to believe you’re going to get better. You just have to wait.”
The Maternal Body
Some of the memoir’s most tender moments come in Rebolini’s reflections on motherhood and how it has both complicated and enriched her relationship to suicide. She describes the embodied experience of loving her son with startling intimacy:
“What I struggle to explain is how embodied my love for Theo is, and his is for me, how it feels feral, primitive, close to the ground. How could this not be the case? I grew him; he lived inside of me, was an extension of my body, only five years ago.”
Motherhood doesn’t “cure” her depression, but it does transform it, creating new layers of complexity in her relationship to life and death. Rebolini articulates the terrifying responsibility of being someone’s reason to live while still struggling with her own desire to die.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Rebolini’s prose is luminous and precise, capable of rendering internal states with remarkable clarity. Her literary background shines through in her careful attention to language and metaphor. The memoir’s structure, while nonlinear, feels purposeful rather than scattered, with each section building upon previous insights to create a complex portrait of depression.
Where the book occasionally falters is in its academic digressions. While Rebolini’s intellectual engagement with suicide literature is generally fascinating, a few sections feel slightly removed from her personal narrative. Some readers might find the numerous literary references and theoretical frameworks occasionally distracting from the emotional core of the story.
Additionally, while Rebolini admirably avoids offering simplistic solutions to complex problems, the memoir’s ending feels somewhat abrupt. Having spent much of the book examining the systemic issues that contribute to depression, she doesn’t fully explore what meaningful change might look like on either a personal or societal level.
Final Thoughts
“Better” by Arianna Rebolini is a profound contribution to literature about mental illness, offering readers a complex understanding of suicidality that respects the intelligence of those who experience it. Rebolini refuses to reduce depression to either purely biological factors or purely social ones, instead showing how these dimensions intersect and interact.
Like the best memoirs, “Better” transforms individual experience into something universal without losing its specificity. Rebolini’s insights will resonate deeply with anyone who has experienced depression, while offering valuable perspective to those who haven’t.
What ultimately makes the memoir so powerful is its embrace of contradiction and ambiguity. Rebolini doesn’t try to resolve the central tension of living with chronic suicidality—how does one build a life while periodically wanting to end it? Instead, she inhabits that tension, showing how beauty and despair, hope and disillusionment, connection and isolation can coexist within a single life.
In a culture that often insists on triumph-over-adversity narratives, Rebolini offers something more complicated but ultimately more honest: an ongoing negotiation with the desire to die that acknowledges both the joy of survival and the continued presence of pain. “Better” suggests that recovery isn’t a destination but a practice—one that requires not just individual effort but structural change and community care.
Comparable Works
For readers interested in exploring similar territory, “Better” by Arianna Rebolini sits alongside other powerful memoirs about mental illness, including:
“An Unquiet Mind” by Kay Redfield Jamison
“The Collected Schizophrenias” by Esmé Weijun Wang
“Darkness Visible” by William Styron
“The Noonday Demon” by Andrew Solomon
Arianna Rebolini has previously co-authored “Public Relations” with Katie Heaney, but “Better” marks her debut as a solo memoirist—and what a remarkable debut it is.