Better

“In Better, Arianna Rebolini writes with awe-inducing clarity, emotional honesty, and intellectual rigor, taking on the immense complexity of suicide and the profound questions it raises. With piercing and deeply personal insight, she reframes the experience of motherhood, exploring how the specter of suicide can shape and fracture a mother’s sense of self. There are readers for whom this may become the most important book they ever read.” – Chloé Cooper Jones, author of Easy Beauty: A Memoir

“Arianna Rebolini’s Better is unlike any memoir I’ve ever read. It’s part cultural commentary, part research, part confessional. Above all, it’s brutally candid and features page-turning anecdotes about her own late-night, early-morning, mid-day episodes of staggering despair. It’s also a strangely and beautifully optimistic reverie on coming clean about our darkest and most intimate struggles while slowly coming to terms with the idea that we might possibly be worthy of love, help, and…life.” – Hannah Pittard, author of We Are Too Many

“Better is an essential memoir. Part literary analysis of suicidality, part life analysis, Rebolini offers an incisive and necessary look into life of managing mental illness. The writing is intimate, revealing, and destigmatizing in a way that has long been necessary and too often avoided. The result is no simple memoir. Beautiful, propulsive and revealing, Rebolini’s approach to her subject is transformative. Better is an act of service to those who have not yet felt seen or considered in discussions around mental health and suicidality. It’s a rare book that serves both as a relief and a rallying cry.” – Erika Swyler, author of We Lived on the Horizon

“Better is a beautifully lucid and generous exploration of suicidality, deftly zooming in on intimate moments within the author’s life, and out to the systemic failures that decimate communities and leave us all at risk. Rebolini interrogates the linear notion of ‘getting better, ’ courageously asking how we might learn to live with the entirety of ourselves, including mental illness and suicide–while treating these painful topics with incredible sensitivity and curiosity. This is a deeply timely and tender book.” – Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility

”[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 brave narrative of radical empathy both for oneself and for others confronting the darkest darkness.” – Kirkus Reviews

Arianna Rebolini is a writer from New York. She is the co-author, with Katie Heaney, of the novel Public Relations. She lives in Queens with her husband, son, and two cats.