A gutsy, riveting memoir-investigation into family suicide, suicidality, and the cyclical, crooked path of recovery.

After a decade of therapy and a stint in the Maimonides psych ward, Arianna was “better.” She’d published her first book, enjoyed an influential, rewarding job as the Books editor at Buzzfeed, and had celebrated the birth of her first child. This made it all the more disturbing when, during bath time, as Theo lined the tub with toy cars, she began calculating how many Effexor she’d have to down to effectively end her life.

Spanning a monthlong period of crisis as a new mother, Better moves through decades of personal and family history, from her first fourth-grade cry-for-help with a plastic knife to her fears of passing along the dark seed of suicide to her own son. Reading through the journals, memoirs, and writings of famous suicides, she developed theories on what makes a suicidal person suicidal, 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. Yet when her own brother is institutionalized, all of the patterns and trenchant insights couldn’t crack the shell of his annihilating depression.

Vibrating with remarkable clarity and compassion, Better is a life-affirming memoir and a profound interrogation of suicide’s public fallout against its intensely private origins and asks one of life’s ultimate questions: how we get better for good?