All Down Darkness Wide : A Memoir

Winner of the 2022 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature ? Named a Best Book of 2022 by Kirkus, Booklist, and Shelf Awareness ? Named a Best Book of July by Buzzfeed ? A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction 2022 Summer Read ? Observer Book of the Week

„The most beautiful prose I’ve read in years.“–Alexander Chee, The Atlantic ? „Rapturous…Hewitt beautifully illuminates his own darknesses so that we might also see our own.“–Melissa Febos, The New York Times Book Review ? „Exquisitely written.“–Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine

When Seán Hewitt meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe mental illness, they soon come face-to-face with crisis.

All Down Darkness Wide is a perceptive and unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender and honest portrayal of what it’s like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one’s deep depression. As lives are made and unmade, this memoir asks what love can endure and what it cannot.

Delving into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures before him, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of answers. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to a sacred grotto in the Pyrenees, it is a journey of lonely discovery followed by the light of community. Haunted by the rites of Catholicism and spectres of shame, it is nevertheless marked by an insistent search for beauty.

Hewitt captures transcendent moments in nature with exquisite lyricism, honours the power of reciprocated desire and provides a master class in the incredible force of unsparing specificity. All Down Darkness Wide illuminates a path ahead for queer literature and for the literature of heartbreak, striking a piercing and resonant chord for all who trace Hewitt’s dauntless footsteps.

Editorial Reviews

03/28/2022

Laurel Prize winner Hewitt (Tongues of Fire) mines the capriciousness of love and pain in this poignant reflection on living with a clinically depressed partner. Unable to find steady work after graduating Cambridge, Hewitt set off on a backpacking trip through South America, where he met Elias. The two quickly fell in love and Elias moved back to Liverpool with Hewitt, despite only knowing him for a short time. „It felt right,“ Hewitt writes. „I’d wanted so long to have someone like him.“ However, when the pair moved to Elias’s native Sweden, a crisis unfolded as the Elias Hewitt knew, typically easygoing and boisterous, was ripped away by a struggle with depression that led to a suicide attempt. In a raw and hypnotic retelling reminiscent of Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, Hewitt recounts the turmoil of loving someone who „was shadowed at every turn by an inversion of himself,“ and whose depression he became ensnared in; over five years, Hewitt writes, „I was so numbed I was barely aware of its presence.“ Yet amid the devastation–which crescendos at their relationship’s end–Hewitt crafts a moving story of salvation, as he charts his path out of darkness and into self-acceptance. It’s an exquisite vision of queer heartbreak and liberation. (July)
– Publishers Weekly

Rapturous . . . even his depictions of cruising have a holy aura. As a dedicated nonfiction writer, I sometimes meet poets’ memoirs with a caginess that is utterly disgraced by a book like this, whose structure is nearly as immaculate as its sentences . . . Writing is always an act of translation, and Hewitt beautifully illuminates his own darknesses so that we might also see our own.“ –Melissa Febos, The New York Times Book Review

„Unique and singularly captivating . . . this memoir is gripping and deserves to be read by anyone looking for some hope in these especially dark times.“ –David Vogel, Buzzfeed

„Exquisitely written . . . In both the rhythms of his sentences and what he relays, Hewitt places himself firmly in an established British literary tradition . . . Though a study of despair, the memoir is not despairing . . . His call, framed by the poets to whom he feels so profoundly connected, as well as by his own family, is radical, a fervent appeal for presence and belonging.“ –Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine

„Some of the most beautiful prose I’ve read in years . . . intensely original.“ –Alexander Chee, The Atlantic

„Vibrates off the page . . . It would be inaccurate to suggest the story is ultimately redemptive. As the memoir proceeds, however, it does so with a discernible sense of opening out, of Hewitt moving away from the shadows.“ –Michael Donkor, The Guardian

„Luminous . . . This book will be passed hand to hand, as it should be . . . Hewitt’s journey into the underworld is, in the end, all about finding words, and the ones he has unearthed are sure to linger with readers.“ –Tim Pfaff, Bay Area Reporter

„Extraordinary . . . Hewitt pulls the reader in, knows how to charm. He is, before and after everything else, a romantic . . . powerful and affecting.“ –Kate Kellaway, The Guardian

„Makes you want to underline, again and again . . . an immense feat of both imagination and empathy.“ –Luke Warde, Sunday Independent

„Poignant and painful, rigorous and sensual . . . Hewitt has forged a life-enhancing memoir . . . an outstanding chronicle of a gay poet’s journey of self-discovery.“ –Michael Arditti, The Spectator

„Stunning . . . enrapturing in its beauty: a rare queer book where the trauma at its heart feels healing.“ –Douglas Greenwood, i-D

„Excellent . . . There is such a casual beauty to his images and metaphors that this reads less like words on a page and closer to torrents of water washing over you . . . a robust and mellifluous text that feels joyous to read . . . A stunning meditation on love and heartbreak, this feels like an essential work of the new Irish queer canon.“ –Barry Pierce, The Times (UK)

„Searching . . . unforgettable . . . as lyrically written as any book of poetry.“ –Rebecca Foster, Shelf Awareness

„Stunning . . . This memoir is a heartbreaking disquisition on ‘ghosts’ like Hopkins and on the unattainability of permanence, and it features one beautiful scene after another . . . A profoundly moving meditation on queer identity, mental illness, and the fragility of life.“ –Kirkus (starred review)

„[A] remarkable book, haunting . . . extraordinary and simply unforgettable.“ –Booklist (starred review)

„This book bears reading twice it is so beautiful. Readers seeking an elegant, profound memoir will find none better than this. Highly recommended.“ –Library Journal (starred review)

„A raw and hypnotic retelling reminiscent of Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness . . . a moving story of salvation . . . an exquisite vision of queer heartbreak and liberation.“ –Publishers Weekly

„Seán Hewitt’s book is a beautiful, complex, and textured meditation on love, on growing up gay, on becoming a poet and on inhabiting Northern landscapes in winter. His account of falling in love and being in love is honest and vivid, doing justice to dark experience, offering the most private moments a sort of glow. I was engrossed, hardly looking up as I read. I woke in the morning fully enclosed by it, as though I had been dreaming it.“ –Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician

„A wondrous act of recollection: flickering yet sonorous, elemental, humid, full of ache, flecked with ironic comedy. Hewitt makes shimmering magic from shame and shyness, through his own whispered disclosures as well as the echoes of other authors. This book arrives as if it was there all along, foxed and dog-eared from the first page.“ –Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar

„Seán Hewitt’s memoir is extraordinarily beautiful (I mean that adverb: it is extra-ordinary) and moving and humane; it is the best new work of nonfiction I’ve read in years.“ –Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent

„The book in your hands is a precious, living thing, each page alive with ache and with love, with truth and with tenderness. To read Seán Hewitt is to experience the rare jolt of encountering a writer whose work will continue to be treasured long after our lifetimes. A wonder.“ –Doireann Ní Ghríofa, author of A Ghost in the Throat

„All Down Darkness Wide is a searing and sublime account of the scars left by intolerance and how they shape a self. Hewitt’s gorgeous prose gleams like a dayspring in the dimness, his story lingering long after the book is closed.“ –Melissa Harrison, author of All Among the Barley

„All Down Darkness Wide lures you in with the beauty of its prose, the poetic images that linger hauntingly in the mind for long afterwards. Difficult stories of mental illness, repression, and self-denial are transfigured into something defiant and life-affirming. I loved the complexity of it, the way he subtly reveals how our fragile identities are formed (and de-formed) by the forces that surround us.“ –Charlie Gilmour, author of Featherhood

„Gorgeous and moving prose that excavates the deep complexities of grief, shame and love with a tenderness and lightness of touch that makes the words sing.“ –Andrew McMillan, author of Physical

„It’s impossible not to be intensely moved by this book, written with a poet’s eye for detail: line after line that grips head and heart. You are truly there with Seán Hewitt in the darkness and the light. His memoir of queer discovery, loves found and lost, the past that we carry with us, and ultimately of becoming, feels like a future classic.“ –Niven Govinden, author of Diary of a Film

„Luminous and utterly original, a book with its own darkly beautiful gravity. I can’t think of anything I have read like it–in terms of style and sensibility, and emotional daring.“ –Niamh Campbell, author of This Happy

„The emergence of a major talent. . . stunning . . . his empathy, intelligence and mastery of language . . . adds something to the world and feels like a space will need to made on the Queer Classics shelf.“ –Paul McVeigh, The Irish Independent

„A sensual history of love and loss, coming-of-age and lapsed Catholicism, and finding the language for the heaviest emotions that are shouldered in queer life . . . in such achingly beautiful, resplendent writing on his darkest moments, we find hope.“ –Anna Cafolla, The Face

„A beautiful, vulnerable account . . . a rich, moving memoir in which Hewitt reveals the loneliness of his early life, but also hope for his future yet to be written.“ –Christiana Bishop, The New Stateman

– From the Publisher

*05/01/2022

This memoir, though ostensibly about a lived life, suggests something spiritual, as befits its title, taken from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. It is also fitting because Hewitt (literature, Trinity Coll., Dublin; J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism) is well-known as a gifted poet, as was Hopkins. He writes about casual sexual encounters but much of the core of the book is taken up with Jack and Elias. Jack was his love at Cambridge as an undergraduate. Though the relationship was brief, Jack, characteristic of first loves, was memorable for many reasons, not the least of which he was very handsome. Hewitt met Elias while travelling in South America. He moved to Sweden to be with him and stayed with Elias as he faced a long bout of depression. There is much more here including an excursion to Lourdes and its ramifications. Even more poignantly, he opens up about his vulnerability to gay shame and its triggers. What can’t be conveyed in a short review is how poetic the writing is. This book bears reading twice it is so beautiful. VERDICT Readers seeking an elegant, profound memoir will find none better than this. Highly recommended.–David Azzolina
– Library Journal

*2022-04-26
A poet recounts his relationship with a man suffering from paralyzing depression.

When Hewitt, who „was brought up vaguely Catholic,“ grew up in 1990s and 2000s England, he felt he needed to show „that I was good, that I was kind, that I followed the rules“ because „I had a secret to keep.“ The secret was that he was gay at a time when the Catholic Church railed against an equal marriage rights bill passing through Parliament. That is only one of the many challenges Hewitt chronicles in this stunning memoir. The death of a boyfriend when Hewitt attended the University of Cambridge made him think of Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poem „The Lantern Out of Doors“ provides this book’s title. Hopkins, a gay man and Dublin priest, is a primary influence in Hewitt’s life. Hewitt frequently references him and „the boundaries blurring between Hopkins’s work and the life I was in,“ especially during the narrative centerpiece: his post-Cambridge relationship with Elias, a young Swedish man he met on a trip to Colombia. The bulk of this book describes Elias and Hewitt’s years together, first in Liverpool and then in Sweden, and Elias’ descent from someone „confident and chatty and open“ to a man who required an extended stay in a psychiatric hospital after contemplating suicide. Scenes in which Hewitt and others try to nurse Elias back to health are among the most memorable. This memoir is a heartbreaking disquisition on „ghosts“ like Hopkins and on the unattainability of permanence, and it features one beautiful scene after another, from the patient at the psychiatric hospital who laments that his son never visits and, when he sees Hewitt, says, „I knew you’d come“; to Hewitt’s own father, who, on his deathbed, confided, „All I want is my boys….As long as I can still be with my boys, and can still sit in the garden and hear the birds. That’s all I want.“

A profoundly moving meditation on queer identity, mental illness, and the fragility of life.
– Kirkus Reviews