May 2026 Open Secrets Book Club Pick: ‘Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die’ by Arianna Rebolini
Join us May 28 at 8 p.m. ET for a live interview about the reality of mental health struggles and writing with author Arianna Rebolini
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and with that in mind, our Open Secrets Book Club selection is Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die by Arianna Rebolini, who was on our mental health panel at Open Secrets Live 2025. The book doesn’t shy away from the intricacy and complications of mental health, and is both a memoir, as the subtitle states, and an exploration of our culture’s treatment of suicidal ideation and some of the most commonly held ideas around it.
We picked Better because it’s entirely in the spirit of Open Secrets Magazine, shining light on a very important topic we so often keep secret, boldly, bravely, personally, and politically.
Join us in the Open Secrets Magazine chat to discuss the book and mental health more widely, and for a Q&A with Arianna on Thursday, May 28 at 8 p.m. ET on Substack Live, which you can watch in the Substack app or on desktop. Please bring your own questions for Arianna, which we will ask as time permits. The discussion will be recorded and posted for anyone who can’t attend live.
Vulture named it one of the Best Books of 2025 and wrote, “Rather than focus solely on the role of mental health in suicide, Rebolini questions the impact of predatory capitalism on the ability to live a good life. How might a country that strips its citizens of health care, employment, and housing play a role in wanting to die? What responsibility should society have in making life better for its most marginalized people? Better offers an insightful, vital portrait of suicide that makes no attempt to euphemize or diminish its subject.”
Read an excerpt from Better, “My Son’s Inheritance,” at The Cut.
Where to buy Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die:
Ebook
Audiobook
About Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die:
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 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 prolonged 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, 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 became institutionalized, Arianna realized that all of the pattern recognition and trenchant insights could not crack the shell of his annihilating depression—and that the only way to help a person live is to address the societal factors that make them want to die.
A harrowing intellectual and emotional odyssey marked by remarkable clarity and compassion, Better is at once a tour through the seductive darkness of death and a life-affirming memoir. Arianna touches on suicide’s public fallout and its intensely private origins as she searches for answers to the profound question: How do we get better for good?
What people are saying about Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die:
“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
“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
About Arianna Rebolini:
Arianna Rebolini is a writer and editor born and raised in New York. Formerly the Books Editor at BuzzFeed News, her criticism, essays, and features have been featured in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Esquire, TIME, The Cut, Vulture, O Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and has been awarded residencies at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts as well as the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow.
Her debut novel, Public Relations (Grand Central Publishing), co-authored with Katie Heaney, is out now. Her memoir, Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die, is is out now. She lives in Queens with her husband, son, and two cats.
This book sounds AMAZING.
I’m really looking forward to this one!