In a literary landscape where mental health narratives often conclude with neat resolutions, Arianna Rebolini’s Better refuses such simplistic closure. Instead, this gutsy, intellectually rigorous memoir maps the jagged terrain of suicidality with a cartographer’s precision and a poet’s sensitivity. Rebolini invites readers into the most vulnerable chambers of her mind, chronicling her relationship with suicidal ideation—from childhood imaginings with a plastic knife to composing goodbye letters to her husband and young son while they slept nearby. What distinguishes Better from other mental health memoirs is Arianna Rebolini’s refusal to package her experience into a redemptive narrative arc. She eschews the “I was sick but now I’m cured” formula for something messier but infinitely more honest: the recognition that recovery isn’t a destination but a winding path with unexpected detours and occasional dead ends. The Intellectual Pursuit of Understanding Self-Destruction Rebolini’s approach is simultaneously intimate and scholarly. Following her hospitalization for suicidal ideation in 2017, she embarks on an investigation of famous suicides—poring over the journals of Sylvia Plath, the letters of Virginia Woolf, and …