Sad girl lit, but make it a memoir

On Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die by Arianna Rebolini

If you enjoy The Underlined and use it as a resource for finding your next great read, please help me sustain this newsletter by becoming a paid subscriber!

A note to readers: The book I am discussing today is about suicide. If you aren’t in the space to read about that subject, please don’t. Might I instead recommend this uplifting interview with Kim Fay, the inspiring and lovely author of Love & Saffron and Kate & Frida?

If, on the other hand, you’re in the right headspace to be exposed to thoughts about suicide, please read on. It’s important we don’t look away.

I met a woman at the AWP writers conference in Kansas City last year. Everything she said as a panelist about book reviewing was sharp. A book critic — formerly with BuzzFeed Books — the girl has got opinions.

She also has a brand new book out called Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die.

Because I liked her (her name is Arianna Rebolini, by the way) and we exchanged a few messages over Instagram, and because I like to support authors when I can, I pre-ordered her memoir when she announced it. I was surprised to read the title: A memoir about wanting to die. She, the panelist I met, had at one point wanted to die?

Less surprising is how difficult it was to read this book. Arianna speaks so nonchalantly about her frequent suicidal thoughts and ideation. I wanted to kill myself, she says many times in many different ways. The shock of it lasted until the very end of the book, and still lingers now as I write to process it.

“The more I write about suicidality,” Arianna says, “the clearer it is to me that doing so is fundamentally an effort to stake a claim in a conversation dominated by fear and disgust.”

Better is her part of the conversation.

If all this makes you feel uncomfortable, first — I see you. I am you. And second — we are lucky not to feel this way, but not everyone is so lucky. This book opened my eyes to both the blatant and less obvious ways suicidality presents itself. I have read a lot of great books already this year, but I think this has been the most important one so far.

Truth vs. fact

In the author’s note, Arianna asks, what is truth in memory? “I am fundamentally more concerned with truth than fact,” she continues. To uncover her truth, she draws on the journals she has kept since she was eight (“I woke up this morning, sat disappointed in myself for five or so minutes, thought about killing myself …”), as well as the journals of Silvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and other famously depressive authors.

What is so unique about Better is that Arianna looks at everything through the lens of a book critic. She doesn’t include only fact-filled research about suicide (though there is plenty of that), but she also references poetry, short stories, and novels, too.

Because, like many of us, Arianna moves through life with books as her guide.

“It struck me that I could best guarantee a permanent banishment of suicide by studying the work of writers who had killed themselves and try to suss out what had gone wrong with them,” Arianna says.

So began her consumption of essays and novels, journals and poetry of the original sad girls,¹ and some sad boys too — though they aren’t categorized similarly — such as David Foster Wallace and Osamu Dazai.

Before she considered looking to these writers who had taken their own lives, she “decided to go to a hospital instead of killing [her]self.” It was after her hospital stay that Arianna started writing this memoir. First, she wrote and wrote — she couldn’t stop writing. “I wrote about life before and after hitting rock bottom. I wrote so that I’d have a record of not only my suicidal self but also my leaving her behind, a portrayal against which I could hold myself accountable.”

Then came the reading. She considers her self-directed study an integral part of her recovery. She had to make a project out of her recovery because her “desire to die has always been directly related to [her] fear of failed ambition.”

Eight years later and Arianna is still here. “I’ve long known,” she says in a chapter called Comfort, “that my most compelling reason for staying alive — the reason that has consistently kept me here — is the fact that I have people in my life whom I love and who love me. But love on its own isn’t comfort. In my most desperate moments, I’ve invoked that love in solitude, a unilateral experience.”

On the following page she says, “Still, this is love as fact rather than process, stripped of its function. I’ve used people as counterarguments to my desire to die, but the key word here is used: by turning real human beings into items in my tool kit, I alone control my access to their love. The key word here is alone.”

Grace burns when you’re certain you don’t deserve it, Arianna says. She may have a husband and a child, parents who love her, adoring siblings she has held close — but love is only a tool when the suicidal believes she is worthy of it. This difference is, of course, life and death.

No more harm vs. no more good

One of the most mind-altering parts of the book was this concept of the lack of harm versus the lack of good.

Arianna explains: “The person who kills himself ‘does no harm to society,’ wrote the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. ‘[H]e only ceases to do good.’ All this time, all those years worrying about having a child, worrying now that Theo [her son]’s here, my fear has been focused on the active effect of my suicide, what it would create — which is to say, its harm. In an already too painful world, my suicide would give Theo a trauma he’d carry until he died. I hadn’t considered the opposite, the ceasing of good: not what I would do to Theo but what I would take from him. There’s something helpful, deceptively positive, in the switch.”

An example of the good that can come from Arianna’s choice not to kill herself, over and over again, is this book. So much good has and will come from Better.

Bullet points, or bite-sized quotes you can take away without reading the book

• “Possibly the most significant factor in suicidality: financial insecurity. If we’re talking about the suicidal person’s pain points, money is everywhere.” And later: “That more money correlates with fewer suicides is consistently shown in research from around the world using varying metrics. Children especially are vulnerable to the effects of poverty; studies in the United States have shown that children ages five to nineteen are 37 percent more likely to kill themselves if they live in ‘high poverty’ communities.”

• The suicidologist Stacey Freedenthal advises clinical providers to begin by engaging honestly in the suicidal person’s desire to die and finding ‘the part that makes sense’ — the conditions in which suicide becomes a ‘logical response’ — and admitting as much to the patient. There is a line between understanding and affirming, and though walking it can be scary it’s also necessary. ‘Validation is evidence of empathy,’ she writes, ‘not an agreement.’”

• “Let’s consider the fact that when we refer, vaguely, to youth suicide, that range begins at five years old. Five years old, as in a kindergartener, as in just a baby, your baby, my baby, as in Theo.”

• “The therapy industry is notoriously lacking in cultural competency. More bluntly, most therapists are white. According to the American Psychological Association’s most recent data, from 2021, only 5 percent of those working in psychology are Black. Many of the rest are ill-equipped to help Black patients — especially Black youths. Upsetting the long-held belief that suicide in the United States is a white issue, it is now in fact Black children who are twice as likely to kill themselves than their white peers, and that rate is increasing faster than within any other demographic. They’re being failed by a system understood through a white lens, built on theories of white pain.”

• “Recovery, at its best, is more expansion than transformation.”

• “What does the suicidal person want? Antrim [MacArthur Fellow and novelist] asks us to start from a positive assumption, to examine the suicidal person’s actions and impulses within the context of their wanting to live. It’s an exercise in gray areas and nuances: ‘I want to die’ becomes ‘I want to live, but I can’t.’”

Better is an amalgamation of quotes, statistics, panicked excerpts from Arianna’s own journals, and the many books she read while saving herself.

Do I recommend this book? It depends.

My experience with Better contradicts itself. The writing kept me moving through the book at a rapid clip, and she expresses her pain and the pain of her loved ones in such a way that I could feel some of it. It moved quickly, but not painlessly. While so much of it was hard to read (from a journal: “Lately depression is physical, unrelenting. Every bit of my body at its edges — the jaw tensed, stomach tight, nauseated, head heavy, crowded. I think about boring a hole into my skull. A little drill. I want to smack it out. Could I really say goodbye?”), I know that writing this book was cathartic for Arianna. I know this because I have written through anything difficult I have ever experienced. By putting her suicidality on paper and sharing it, Arianna is working toward finding her “better.” She may never stop wanting to die, she says, but right now she is here and she has composed this beautiful book with an absent ego and an admirable display of strength and resilience.

If suicide is hard for you to read about, maybe don’t pick up this book right now. But if you can handle it, it will move you. It will make you feel, as a good story is supposed to do. It is so easy to look the other way when presented with discomfort, but strength comes in sitting with realities and feeling your own unease.

This book did that for me.

You can support Arianna, yourself, and/or any loved ones for whom suicidality is real by ordering a copy of Better. Please forward this to anyone who might need to hear about this book. ❤️

What are you reading? What are you underlining?

What I’m reading: Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

What I’m underlining: [Let Us Descend]: “The first weapon I ever held was my mother’s hand.” What a banger of a first line!

Love, Kolina

---

When you purchase books through my links, you support this newsletter and an indie bookstore of your choice at no additional cost to you.

1. I think Sad Girl Lit is a problematic name for a trope, and in fact I think it being a trope is problematic in itself. Why should sad women be tropes? From The Guardian: “Perhaps we aren’t able to identify more complex emotions, in particular those that are unpleasant, like anger, in these novels, because of our increasingly infantilised view of women authors.” I will save this argument for a future post.