How to Get Better

"Why do I have to arrive at beauty? Why can’t I just have a body?" An interview with Arianna Rebolini

This newsletter will contain frank discussion of suicide. Please take care and if this is not for you, feel free to skip to the bottom “Toppings” section for what I’ve been reading, watching and recommending lately.

Main Meal

This past winter, the voice of death began to knock yet again on my door. Not just hello, as per usual, but let me in. Why? Who knows! I’ve been “better” for a long time but I’ve also been worse lately. The cause was America, obviously, but it was also reckoning with profound burnout, and a sense that being a writer didn’t mean doing the job of writing but actually doing three jobs, including one which feels at times actively harmful to my mental health, a thing I’ve written previously about in this newsletter.

I know I’m not alone in this, not just with having active clinical depression but being someone who can visit that place that feels beyond friends and beyond language, a patch of land at the end of the earth. I know I am not alone in it partly because of the work of

Arianna Rebolini

, a writer, critic, and the longtime editor of Buzzfeed Books until its news and culture verticals were gutted. Arianna’s second book, Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die is coming out from HarperCollins on April 29 and I’ve been rabidly “anticipating” it ever since I saw the announcement that she’d sold it.

I think a lot of us want to know, whether to better understand ourselves or someone we care about, the answer to the book’s central question: “Why do so many people want to die—and how do we begin to understand what makes a person choose suicide?” I was also curious to hear how Arianna, someone who has worked professionally in the publishing industry for so long and has been open about her struggle with suicidality, would articulate and parse the emotional and social impact of rooting one’s life in the business of books. If you’re coming for the juicy insights into what happened with Buzzfeed’s implosion—I was—there’s some of that too. 👀

Below is my interview with Arianna. We got into writing under late stage capitalism, whether “making a name for oneself” in writing is really the life goal anymore, the role her eating disorder played in her desire to die, and body neutrality. I hope you enjoy <3

Emma Copley Eisenberg: Something that really resonated for me in Better was the idea of wanting to die or suicidality as a kind of imaginative escape hatch, a coping mechanism actually, that in some ways kept you functional and also held you back from developing other ways of confronting and dealing with your depression. This felt like a really radical idea to me and a way also of making suicidality less romantic and more practical. How did you arrive at that insight?

Arianna Rebolini: That was something that came together gradually over many years, a kind of suspicion that strengthened into a conviction through therapy and also through reading work from people who experienced the same thing. I had to give up the idea of linear recovery before I could really understand it, though, because in order to recognize suicidal ideation as something functional, as a habit that provides me some level of comfort, I had to accept that I was returning to it continuously. It was a different animal. What’s funny is I have this really clear memory that has been impossible to verify—I tried for a long time because I wanted to include it in the book!—of doing a puzzle one night a few months after my stay at the psych ward, listening to Maria Bamford on a podcast, and hearing her say that getting better meant she had to give up her habit of reminding herself she could kill herself whenever anything remotely upsetting happened. I made a note of it in my journal but didn’t think to include details like, say, the name of the podcast, and I have never been able to locate it. Maybe I invented it! But that was a big moment for me: Other people do this, too!

ECE: There is so much in this book about writing and your work as both an editor at Buzzfeed and a writer trying, and sometimes failing, to earn a living. It’s an easy platitude that “writing is hard” or “writing makes us depressed” but what do you really think about this? Do you think that being a professional writer/working in media under 21st century capitalism and being a person who wants to die are interrelated for you?

AR: I do, but trying to articulate that connection is so hard for me because if I’ve learned anything from writing Better it’s that capitalism touches basically every aspect of despair. I think anyone who makes any kind of art is probably experiencing profound hopelessness these days, or at the very least disillusionment. People have been asking me what comes next now that the book is (almost) out and I keep skirting the issue with jokes because if I’m being honest I worry—as a bestie and writer recently said in a close friends Instagram story—that writing is just dead.

It’s one thing to grapple with the fact that an artist most likely can’t support themselves through their art, but it’s another to face the growing sense that so many people seem to think art itself is unnecessary. So it’s impossible for me not to feel some level of existential panic, not to mention a disorienting disconnect from so much of humanity, when I think about the state of writing and media and the arts. But! Also! I think realizing this—the role of capitalism in despair and suicidal tendencies—has actually been helpful in terms of being able to hold real, heavy fear without turning to suicide. The anger is directed outward; it’s all less murky. There’s a clearer solution and there are a lot of people working toward it.

ECE: In a similar vein, there’s so much you explore in the book about ambition and credibility and the catch 22 of thinking you are worthless because you’re not producing and also not producing because you feel worthless. Where have you landed on the importance in your life of “making it” or “making a name for yourself” in the industry of writing versus the importance of doing things like staying alive and being with family? I ask this from a selfish place of wanting to know the answer for myself.

AR: What I want to say is: lmao, ask me in like three months when I know if Better is successful. And I’m sort of kidding, because I know how inconsequential this all is, and how fleeting success would be even if I get it, but I also know I will be extremely fucking depressed if it’s a dud! I used to have dreams of being this famous generational talent, but then being adjacent to people who have had tastes of that kind of attention turned me off of it—not for anything they did, but for witnessing the effect on them. It’s stressful! And scary! So that aspect, the making a name of it all, is less important to me because it feels less desirable, at least right now. I suspect, and worry a bit, that that will change if suddenly I’m the one getting attention.

Where I’ve landed is that I understand that my ambition, and all of the good and bad that comes with it, isn’t going away, so what’s vital is having checks and balances in place to keep me from getting mired in it. Cultivating community with people who aren’t writers, or who aren’t chronically online like I am, has been a big part of that. I need those reality checks with people I admire for reasons that have nothing to do with critical acclaim, people who don’t even recognize the names of the writers and critics whose approval I’ve agonized over. I do think parenting helps, too—nothing destroys the ego like a child.

ECE: You write about your eating disorder mostly at a glance, but it’s strongly implied that you struggled mightily with bulimia and that body shame and dysmorphia were a part of wanting to die for you. Is there anything more you might share with this community, a space where many people are in recovery from eating disorders and thinking really critically about unlearning fatphobia and nurturing our mental health?

AR: Hoo boy, yes. You’re right that my hatred of my body, and the unsustainable eating disorder(s) that grew from it, has played a large part in my wanting to die. For Better, I pulled a ton from my journals, and it was devastating to see the vitriol in the entries from my teens and early 20s. I’m grateful I’m far enough away from that level of body shame to have forgotten how bad it really was, but I am by no means at a place of, hell yeah, I’m perfect the way I am!!

My aim is fundamentally body neutrality. Discovering that concept was a huge turning point for me, because everything that came before was just a shifting of guilt and shame—I went from trying and failing to lose weight to trying and failing to see myself as beautiful. Why do I have to arrive at beauty? Why can’t I just have a body? I will say, this is an area where I’m constantly, desperately seeking insights to sustain me because I know I’m still so susceptible to diet culture. A recent favorite was this TikTok from the screenwriter Remy Solomon about how she “doesn’t have time to be hungry” because her life is so great. She starts it by saying “I don’t know what young girl needs to hear this,” and I’m like, hi, yes! Part of me is still that young girl!

ECE: I love that so much! Me too.
One thing I wished we talked more about in bookish media is that any book that is being published was written by someone who is three selves prior to the person we are now. What is top of mind for you now, either practically or intellectually, about depression and mental health? How are you keeping yourself well (ish) through the process of releasing a book?

AR: God, this is such a good point—it was wild to discover just how done you are with your book by the time it’s published. (Which can make promo… tricky!) A big theme of Better is my fear of letting go of suicide and depression, and for just shy of eight years, writing it was my excuse for keeping both close. Not to be too on the nose, but I couldn’t really get better without shutting the book. I’m still in therapy, I’m re-evaluating my meds. I’m asking for help when I need it. I’m also avoiding Goodreads and changing my privacy settings on Instagram so that only people I follow can tag me (lol). I know my limits and triggers, and I’m trying to be proactive in preserving my sanity!

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I’m trying a new thing! There are so many great Substack newsletters out there and no one, me included, can afford to pay every month for all of them. But I wish I could support my favorite writers now and then when I really like something.

Frump Feelings, and this post in its entirety, is free to read. But if you liked today’s interview or a past one and find value in my work, I encourage you to contribute $5 today via buy me a coffee. So appreciate you!

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Toppings

• I’ve been re-reading short story collections by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Bryan Washington, and

  George Saunders
  to see how they work.

• I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Rainbow Black by Maggie Thrash. The narrator Hope Newhouse is excellent and the story of a young queer girl whose parents get caught up in false allegations during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s is everything I’ve needed on my spring walks.

• As a person who recently bought a new house (eek!) I’ve become a fan of Matriarchy Build, a network of women and nonbinary contractors, handy people, and trade professionals who work online nationwide helping you know if that quote you got for your project is fair or bonkers, and locally in Philly and Austin matchmaking homeowners with non dude contractors. The Lord’s work tbh.

• A class I’m excited about is this body liberation reading group.

• A class I’m teaching is a reprise of the super fun class I did last year about how to dive into writing fiction if you’re brand new to it. How do you start writing fiction? Say you have an idea for a character but don’t know how to “flesh them out”? How do you trust your ideas or know which ones are worth pursuing? Featuring voice memo advice from some of the best fiction writers working today, it will be online on Saturday May 3, from 1-4pm; head over to Tin House to register where spots are going fast.

• I’ll be giving a reading from Housemates and talking craft and queer life in Philadelphia with poet and professor Michelle Taransky on Tuesday, April 22nd at UPenn’s lovely glassed-in garden space at Kelly Writer’s House, co-sponsored by Penn’s LGBT center. Free registration is here.

• I’ll be in conversation with Ocean Vuong for his second novel The Emperor of Gladness on Thursday 5/15 at First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia. Should be grand! Tickets are required and available here.

  

I think that is all! Go photosynthesize like the plant you are.

xx

Emma

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