Arianna Rebolini’s Higher: A Memoir of Wanting To Die (Harper; April 2025) is a unprecedented hybrid, weaving collectively confessional narrative, exhaustive analysis, and cultural evaluation.

Rebolini examines the writings and deaths of well-known suicides, critiques the psychological healthcare system, explores familial patterns of psychological sickness, and asks the elemental query that haunts anybody who’s stood at that precipice: what makes an individual need to die?

The construction mirrors the recursive nature of suicidal pondering itself, circling again via many years of her life; from a cry for assist in fourth grade with a plastic knife to composing goodbye letters to her husband and son whereas they slept close by, after a decade of remedy and residing a life that, to individuals on the skin, appeared to be “higher.”

Rebolini writes about suicidal melancholy with exact readability. Her descriptions of the inside expertise leap off the web page and lodge themselves in your chest. She captures the peculiar logic of desirous to die, the best way it might probably coexist with love and duty and even moments of pleasure, the best way it lurks like a well-known shadow you’ve discovered to stay alongside. Higher is a welcome mental and emotional interrogation of a psychological state our tradition desperately desires to pathologize into silence.

I learn Higher cowl to cowl in seven hours. I do know it was seven hours as a result of I learn it sitting within the ready space of an adolescent psychiatric inpatient facility whereas my son underwent his consumption analysis for melancholy and suicidal ideation — psychological struggles he completely inherited from me. I hadn’t deliberate to deliver this explicit ebook; that morning, shouldering the heavy feelings of a single father or mother who lastly admitted we couldn’t do it alone anymore, I grabbed a ebook off the highest of my TBR stack with out wanting. The universe has a darkish humorousness…and impeccable timing.

What Rebolini does brilliantly is combine cultural context and scholarly examination seamlessly together with her private story. She explores how capitalism’s calls for contribute to our collective demise drive, how psychological healthcare stays inaccessible even for these with insurance coverage (one notably infuriating passage particulars her ninety-minute telephone name with insurance coverage firms, armed with medical billing codes, simply to seek out out if she may afford therapy), and the way melancholy manifests in a different way throughout racial traces. This broader evaluation doesn’t distract from the memoir’s emotional core; it enriches it, inserting particular person struggling inside systemic failures that make individuals need to die.

Sitting within the Philadelphia hospital’s consumption room, I watched different dad and mom with their teenagers. We had been all, I believed, trapped in our personal hells of inherited ache and parental inadequacy. Higher ought to have felt heavy, suffocating, not possible to learn given the place I used to be and why, and my very own historical past of being consumed with emotions of desirous to die. As a substitute it generated a heat in my chest — a sense of solidarity. I felt bolstered by the data that another person has felt this too, has survived it, has finished the excruciating work of inspecting it somewhat than hiding it. Rebolini’s memoir grew to become an sudden companion throughout one of many loneliest experiences of my life. It was a hand reaching via the darkish to not pull me out however to sit down beside me and say: I do know.

Her exploration of motherhood whereas managing suicidal ideation is especially shifting. She writes about her resolution to have a toddler regardless of her psychological well being historical past, in regards to the tether her son gives at the same time as she nonetheless experiences suicidal ideas, in regards to the terror of passing down the darkish seed of her psychology to him. The vulnerability required to say motherhood whereas overtly discussing ongoing suicidality, to reject the narrative that you simply should be “cured” to should father or mother, is an act of defiant self-definition.

The braveness it takes to write down actually about being each mom and somebody who nonetheless typically desires to die is strictly what makes this ebook important. As a father or mother grappling with the identical concern — that I’ve handed this darkness to my little one, that my very own struggles have someway marked them — studying Rebolini’s refusal to be ashamed was its personal form of salvation.

What I like most is Rebolini’s refusal to supply straightforward solutions or redemptive arcs. She interrogates her personal expertise with mental rigor, poring over the journals and writings of people that accomplished suicide, attempting to grasp that deadly second between desirous to die and doing it When her brother turns into institutionalized, she realizes all her sample recognition and theories can’t crack the shell of his melancholy. Higher is an acknowledgment that restoration isn’t linear, that getting higher doesn’t imply the ideas disappear without end, and that survival is a follow somewhat than a vacation spot.

I couldn’t put the ebook down. Not due to plot — this isn’t that form of narrative propulsion — however as a result of each web page felt like being seen with such readability that it grew to become its personal type of consolation. In that ready room, going through one of the vital horrifying days of my parenting life, feeling profoundly alone, Rebolini’s phrases jogged my memory that isolation is a lie our disgrace tells us. Higher didn’t make the state of affairs much less terrifying, nevertheless it sat with me via these seven hours, and that companionship — that literary hand-holding via the darkish– was precisely what I wanted.

Silence about our darkest impulses solely deepens isolation. Darkish ideas develop louder within the echo chamber of disgrace. Rebolini’s resolution to talk plainly about suicidal ideation as an ongoing situation she manages creates house for the remainder of us to breathe. That is radical work. By refusing to cover the uncomfortable fact that she could be a loving mom, a profitable skilled, an individual in restoration, and nonetheless typically need to die, she provides permission for the remainder of us to exist in our full, sophisticated humanity.