“Better” Asks Us to Reframe Conversations About Suicide

What drives someone to die by suicide is an enigma that will forever exist on the edge of our understanding. Although we can never truly know a person’s thoughts in their final moments of life, Arianna Rebolini gives us an intimate look inside the mind of someone who’s been there in her debut memoir, Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die. She details her struggle in a narrative that’s at once vulnerable, lyrical, and investigative. Despite the obvious successes of Rebolini’s life—having a career in editing and a published novel, a close-knit family, and a loving marriage with a healthy child—she deals with overwhelming despair. 

One day, instead of trying to kill herself, Rebolini checks into a psychiatric unit. The memoir follows her hospitalization, weaving in reflections from throughout her life: there are her initial thoughts of suicide in childhood, her attempt as a teenager, and conversations with her therapist, husband, and son, Theo. Rebolini grapples with a fear of “infecting” her son with her mental health, a fear that grows as her brother—who’s deeply similar to Theo—sinks further into his own depression. She scrutinizes Theo’s behavior, hypervigilant for signs of distress, and wonders if he should see a psychologist.

Delving into broader historical and cultural themes, Rebolini explores famous suicides—analyzing the writing of Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and David Foster Wallace—as she searches for an explanation as to why a person might succumb to their darkest urges. She also researches the insidious reality of systemic factors, such as barriers to mental health care and dehumanization in modern-day workplaces, and shows how they amplify suicidal thoughts.   

As someone coping with chronic suicidality who shared high school classes with Rebolini, my whole heart goes out to her. Like cars in side by side lanes, we drove the same direction for years but were too trapped in our own stories to notice the other’s struggle. I wonder how we could have supported one another. Recently, we spoke on Zoom about what “better” means, the inaccessibility of behavioral healthcare, mental health’s impact on motherhood, the stigma of honesty, and why society is so afraid of suicide. 

Continue on to Electric Literature to read the full interview. Written by Marisa Russello.