Better

A VULTURE BEST BOOK OF 2025 (SO FAR) "[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 mental health 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 began a challenging path to recovery and 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, exploring the nuances of generational trauma, 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…