"Seán Hewitt’s poeticism bleeds into his prose to create a stunningly crafted memoir exploring the internal conflict of embracing oneself as a queer person in the context of social discrimination and mockery as well as explain the rarely discussed experience of being in a long-term relationship with someone experiencing suicidal depression. He brings the two themes together in a painful and raw manner. I went to a reading for this a few months ago and he told the crowd that, as cliche as it sounded, he wanted to write the book he wished he had been able to read when going through the experiences he addresses in his writing. In my opinion, he’s done it, and spectacularly so. His writing is the most honest I’ve ever read."
Publisher Penguin Press
Publication Date 2022-07-12
Section New Hardcover - Biography / All Staff Suggestions / Nonfiction Suggestions / Summer P.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780593300084
“A beautiful, complex, and textured meditation on love, on growing up gay, on becoming a poet . . . I was engrossed . . . I woke in the morning fully enclosed by it, as though I had been dreaming it.” —Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician
By turns devastating and soaring, an ambitious memoir debut from one of Irish literature’s rising stars, Seán Hewitt
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.
