“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. 

Marisa Russello: People have long been fascinated and horrified by the topic of suicide, but your book centers on the idea of moving toward something “better.” What does “better” mean to you and where did your motivation for writing this memoir come from?

Arianna Rebolini: I knew this book was going to be called Better before I knew what the book was going to be, and it’s one of the few things that stayed consistent over eight years of writing. My whole life I’ve said I want to be “better,” but I don’t think I can know how to be better if I don’t know what that word actually means. And so the motivation was to figure out, what does “better” mean? What would a better life look like? What would be better enough to feel like I’m living an okay life? And how can I get there? 

That’s something that shifted throughout the writing—I don’t think it is a static concept. I wanted to settle into an idea and be like, Okay, so this is what I’ve decided is better enough. Now I know. Even still, I don’t think I have a firm grasp on what it means. But I think the “enough” is important. When it comes to health, we think of better as done with: I had this cold, and now I’m better, and think of it as a final stage rather than a relative one. So as far as suicide goes, for me, better means being alive and not having a life that is primarily focused on figuring out if I’m okay, just allowing myself to be.

MR: I like that concept of “allowing yourself to be,” not worrying about every little dip into sadness, because it’s normal to get sad. For me, I feel like I’m in more of an in-between state now—I’m not cured, but I’m not sick. Sometimes I really want to live, but sometimes I do want to die.

As far as suicide goes…better means being alive and not having a life that is primarily focused on figuring out if I’m okay.

AR: I feel like I’ve spent so long being like, Well, I’m not really better until that section is gone—until I’m done with going through points in my life where I want to die, so it was important to acknowledge that those periods don’t have to mean I’m not okay. Otherwise, I’ll be waiting forever. 

MR: I really appreciate how candid you are about such difficult subjects. Have you encountered any challenges when discussing these stigmatized topics so openly? 

AR: I’m lucky that in writing online I have found my audience, so when it comes to mental illness and suicide, I haven’t gotten a lot of trolls. Yet something I have dealt with is navigating people who are close to me reading it and their reactions. Whether being like, I didn’t know it was this bad, I’m sorry that happened, or This made me really feel bad, that’s something I have a hard time figuring out how to manage because if you want to write about this stuff, you have to go in knowing it probably will hurt people who are close to you. 

What I’ve gotten the most trolls about is speaking candidly about motherhood and not really coming to it naturally. That’s where I’ve had people on social media be like, I’m going to call CPS. I go through periods where the way I handle it is engaging earnestly and being like, Why do you think that? Other times, I’m like, Whatever, block. But it’s something that scared me a lot and still worries me. 

MR: People are so hard on moms. How do you think your narrative might be able to change the broader conversation about mental health and suicide? 

AR: Not everyone has the time to do research and spend so many hours thinking about this. So I really like thinking about this book as: I’m not the only person who lives with this. I’m not the only person who has these thoughts. So I’m going to create one cohesive presentation of something that I have felt, something that I’ve seen other people feel and write about, and put it all together in a way that hopefully resonates. 

Mental illness as a whole is a really complicated conversation, but when it comes to suicide, the stakes are so high, so I understand why people are like, We have to be strict about how we talk about it, because, God forbid, we set off someone else’s suicide. I get that fear. But if there’s anything we know about the history of how we understand psychology, there are so many times we thought we had it right, and we had it wrong. So we think we have this right, and we’re like, This is how to talk. This is what we know is the safe way. Don’t say “commit suicide” because that has negative connotations, and don’t do this. And we think that now, but what are we going to think in ten years? We do have to risk a little if we want to talk about it in a meaningful way. 

MR: Something you wrote about that makes me really angry, and I think makes you feel that way too, is the inaccessibility of behavioral health care. 

AR: I feel like anyone who’s tried to navigate the system understands how impossible it is. It’s so expensive [to live] here, and the majority of psychiatric providers don’t take insurance. That’s something I’ve had a really hard time grappling with ethically and morally. You’re going to them like, you’re supposed to help me, but you charge $400 an hour and don’t take insurance, like how do you square that? And how do I, as the patient, trust you? 

Understanding how the insurance companies kind of bully the providers into this setup, I think it’s the fault of the system, but the person who bears the brunt of it is the one who’s in crisis, especially because we don’t really think of mental health care as preventative. When you need help the most, it’s the hardest to get quickly. You’re not in any state to navigate all these steps and figure out how much you’re going to spend, so it’s a system that does not encourage people to use it, which is maddening whether you’ve needed it for yourself or you’ve tried to help loved ones get the help they need. 

MR: Yeah, just yesterday I was on hold for two hours with my insurance about a $2,000 reimbursement for my psychiatrist. For some reason it wasn’t processed. They said there was a glitch in the system, and they never notified me. I can’t imagine if I didn’t keep track of these things. 

AR: Oh my God! I’ve had versions of that conversation so many times, and you suspect it’s on purpose. Then seeing that ProPublica investigation and interviews with people who worked for United Healthcare and Cigna and [realizing] no, it is on purpose. They want to keep you on hold for hours. They want you to lose track. They want to make it so that you’re like, This is not worth the money, and then they don’t have to pay. 

MR: It’s infuriating. When you were reviewing the research, did you learn anything especially compelling or surprising that you would want to share?

AR: I am a feminist, and I think something that was important for me was seeing how the patriarchy and the same systems that oppress women, those systems are hurting men too—to the point that it’s a large part of why men kill themselves more than women. 

Edwin Schneider—I don’t think I quoted him—but in his work he’s talking to men who kill themselves because their wives make more money. And you’re like, Oh my God! These fucking men. But it was important to take a step back and [reconsider] that that should make me more sympathetic because it’s the exact same system. The man—who believes that women need to make less and kills himself because his wife is more successful—is suffering from the same system that hurts the woman who is hated because she makes more. The man’s suffering is harder to grapple with because largely he benefits from that expectation, but the end result is him killing himself. I sympathize with that, and that was really interesting to read and think about. I still believe that so much of suicide comes from people’s inability to meet these arbitrary requirements of society.

MR: Authors whose writing you engaged with, like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, were celebrated for their artistic genius, yet their works present a romanticized view of suffering. How did reading them deepen or challenge your understanding of suicidal ideation?

AR: I think what it really did was make me question the worthwhileness of interrogating suicidal thought, which is a funny thing to come to terms with while I’m literally researching and writing a book about suicide. If there’s one thing I really came out feeling strongly about, it’s I got this out of my system and I never want to think about [suicide] this much ever again. 

I think record keeping is great, obviously—I’m a writer. You want to observe and learn. But you read Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, and you’re like, Oh my God! It is exhausting. There’s only so much you can say about being depressed. And it’s not a matter of like, Oh, get over it because I know it’s not that easy. But there’s a threshold where examination is no longer useful, when it just becomes like a quicksand. One of them talks about this. I think that you do get stuck deeper and deeper, and it’s hard to pull yourself out when it’s all you’re thinking about, whether you’re writing about wanting to die or figuring out like, Okay, I’m feeling good today. What made me feel good today? How can I do that again? It’s just so much thought, and that interiority makes it really hard to live your life outside of it. 

MR: A theme your book touches on is motherhood—your vulnerability in this part of the memoir is so refreshing. How has your journey with mental health influenced your approach to parenting, particularly when it comes to balancing open conversation about your experiences with protecting your son from the heaviness of those challenges? 

AR: That’s something I think about probably every day. I’m always trying not to project onto him my own history and my family history of mental illness, and I’m glad I have my husband, Brendan, to balance me out when I’m like, Oh my God, he’s so anxious. He’s so depressed. Well, he’s also just a five-year-old who doesn’t really know how the world works. 

There’s a threshold where examination is no longer useful, when it just becomes like a quicksand.

It’s a balance of wanting to protect him but also understanding that kids are really smart, and they figure things out on their own. When I was looking at studies about suicide with kids as young as five, I was like, Oh my God! In my mind, when I have been afraid of Theo becoming suicidal, he’s—I don’t know—in middle school, but of course it can start younger than that. You just kind of forget as you get older how real life is, even when you’re six or seven. I try more than anything to start with honesty and respect and err on the side of not giving him enough information. 

I’m hoping, talking to my psychologist and a child psychologist about what he can handle and when, whether it’s about his mental health or mine, that they’ll guide me because it’s something I’m very scared of getting wrong.

MR: I mean, who wouldn’t be scared of getting it wrong? I’m a foster parent, and the teenager who lived with us last year had depression. We ended up bonding over that, so sharing my feelings was something helpful [to my child]. But I was recently in a support group for people with suicidal thoughts, and someone was like, Oh, I’d never tell my kids because they would feel like they’d have to take care of me. And I thought, Oh my God! Should I have done that?

AR: It’s so imperfect, right? You can argue from either side. I literally wrote a book about wanting to die, so there’s no way Theo’s not going to know. But I think there’s a way to make it clear, like, This is something I have, too. And if you want to talk, I understand, but it is not your job to worry about me. I am taking care of myself. I think you can manage both. 

MR: I appreciate that. So, given your own experiences with despair, what lessons do you hope to pass on to Theo regarding emotional well-being and resilience?

AR: I hope he can bypass the stage of figuring out how to accept this as part of himself. I think, for me—and this is not my parents’ fault, it’s the generation we were in—I spent those first years of living with OCD and depression, and then suicidal ideation, not really understanding and then having to do the work of figuring out what it was, figuring out that it wasn’t a bad thing to have, and coming to terms with it. I’d like Theo to be able to skip that work and just know. 

And I hope he will have an easier time accepting help and drawing on strength from others when he doesn’t feel strong or resilient himself. Resilience doesn’t have to mean doing it alone. 

MR: What are your thoughts about why our society is so afraid of suicide?

AR: It’s scary to be like, What would make a person want to stop living? And what about our lives and the systems we live in makes that person decide that dying would be better than existing? 

As tough as [those systems are], being like, Well actually, maybe there should be a different system is scarier because that’s an unknown, and people don’t want to grapple with the idea that suicide has external factors. It’s easier to believe there’s something wrong with that person. That person was sick. They weren’t in their right mind. I think it’s very scary to look earnestly at the possibility that, no, they had valid reasons for wanting to die. And those reasons—their circumstances—didn’t need to be the case. Those are big, big questions that involve everyone. And it’s scary to think about how the world can and should be different and what that would mean.

MR: Absolutely. I think when a loved one dies by suicide, it shows that their suffering was so uncontrollable that they felt they had no choice but to die. What does that say about us? And I feel like that realization is terrifying. 

AR: That’s a good point, too, because deciding to kill yourself requires so much isolation, and a lot of times it’s not apparent. I think it reveals a lot of distance between you and people that you love. 

MR: Very true. Your book should be an excellent resource for clinicians and for families of people struggling. What do you hope your story will offer these readers?

AR: My biggest hope would be that it opens up room for uncomfortable conversations because I think the best thing you can do to engage with and possibly help someone is just to acknowledge, Yeah, that makes sense that you want to die from the way you’ve described it. I understand. It sounds simple, but it’s such a hard thing to say because you don’t want them to be like, I told you so. I’m going to go kill myself now. But you really need to get uncomfortable to actually help someone. 

MR: In my experience, [someone suicidal] would be relieved, maybe even hopeful, that you’re listening and validating them, and they would open up more.

AR: And there is research [that supports] that’s the best thing you can do to help…it means you can actually talk about what’s going on. 

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