All Down Darkness Wide

by Seán Hewitt

A luminous and haunting memoir from the prize-winning poet - a story of love, heartbreak and coming of age, and a fearless exploration of queer identity and trauma.

When Seán meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe depression, the couple comes face-to-face with crisis. Wrestling with this, Seán Hewitt delves deep into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures and poets before him. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to the pine forests of Gothenburg, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of solace and hope.

All Down Darkness Wide is an unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender portrayal of what it's like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one's suffering. By turns devastating and soaring, it is a mesmerising story of heartache and renewal, and a work of rare and transcendent beauty.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Queer, LGBT, Poetry, Mental Health, Gay

240 pages, Hardcover

First published July 12, 2022

About the author

Seán Hewitt's debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire (2020), won the Laurel Prize in 2021. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (2022), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022. He lives in Dublin.

Reviews

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

unpopular opinion alert!!!!

i wanted more from this book.

like...they say if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all, but what if you have one really nice thing to say and then no other nice things?

this writing is brilliant and lovely but i don't really get what we're doing here - i don't think the purpose was the individual story, i think there was supposed to be a broader point, but it didn't feel finished to me and i never really connected with the story itself.

but i still liked it?

i don't know what to tell you.

bottom line: just ignore me!!!

---------------
tbr review

memoirs are books that are both true and not boring. in other words the dream scenario

(thanks to the publisher for the ARC)

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The great Muriel Rukeyser asked, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” And I think that could be said again. What would happen if a queer person told the truth about their life? Maybe the world might be queerer, might be (in the words of Hopkins) more “counter, original, spare, strange”, than we previously thought.”

Poet, academic and Irish Times critic Seán Hewitt’s exquisitely-written memoir develops themes, and explores territory, that will be familiar to anyone who knows his poetry: an intense connection with the natural world; meditations on mortality; his immense grief at the loss of his father; struggles with his identity and with what it is, or was, to grow up gay in an overwhelmingly heterosexual world, and at its centre his troubled relationship with his former partner Elias. They met, fell in love and eventually moved to Elias’s home in Gothenburg, Sweden. There they planned to live together while Elias studied and Hewitt worked on a thesis examining the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins. At first everything went to plan but then Elias was overwhelmed by depression and thoughts of suicide, and both their lives underwent a momentous change. Hewitt’s account of their time together, the guilt, the anguish, the uncertainty, is deeply moving, close to self-laceratingly direct, the beauty and precision of his prose almost at odds with the trauma he’s recounting. Interwoven with Hewitt’s experiences are elements of the verse and life histories of two poets: Manley Hopkins whose queer desires were a lifelong source of torment and shame; and Swedish poet Karin Boyes whose death by suicide was precipitated by the death of the woman she loved. The result’s an incredibly evocative, memorable and thought-provoking piece. Highly recommended.

Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Penguin Press for an arc

[literaryelise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to The Penguin Press and Seán Hewitt for an advanced reader's copy of this incredible book! Full list of trigger warnings at the bottom.

"That impassable, treacherous terrain of the mind, those chasms of despair. How could anyone who hadn't felt those cliffs know them? How could I ever know Hopkins, or Elias? How could I ever see past the mirrored surface that reflected everything back at me with my own image imposed across it?"

I've taken awhile to post my review because, honestly, I needed time to process. This is such an incredible memoir chock full of heart wrenching reflections on interpersonal relationships, queer identity, queer love, mental illness, spirituality, and belonging. This book is for the poetry lovers, the existential spiralers, the Connell Waldron stans, the queer-and-grew-up-religious-and-are-having-kind-of-a-tough-time-processing-all-that girlies, and of course, those living with mental illness. All of the aforementioned descriptors are things that I would attribute to myself which is why this book is so special for me. If you relate to any of those things, I cannot recommend this book more highly.

I'm not sure if I've ever related to a memoir (or any book for that matter) quite like I did with this book. I've never encountered an author, queer theorist, or anyone in my life who conceptualizes queerness in the way Hewitt does and has put those feelings into words and on the written page. I'm so incredibly grateful to Seán Hewitt for doing the work to put these thoughts out into the world because I related deeply to how he talked about queer identity and his struggle for self realization. "My body and my queerness and my life became inseparable. Through that splitting away, I felt myself becoming irrevocably and radically whole." Hewitt does not shy away from the underbelly that is the closet and social ostracization. He honors and reinforces the importance of self acceptance while also being honest about its challenges. I think he puts into words what a lot of queer people might relate to and in doing so, offers comaradery and acceptance.

Additionally, as someone who lives with (at times severe) mental illness- I really appreciated Hewitt's perspective and discussions of depression. It came as no surprise to me when I learned Hewitt has written poetry. Poets are meant to translate emotion and experience through unique and distinct concrete imagery. Hewitt does this perfectly when he writes about his experience with and adjacent to severe mental illness. He brings to life feelings that you might not have even realized you felt. He takes that aching, metastasizing, unfathomable weight in your chest and he pulls it out into the light so that you might finally see it and begin to understand it. Hewitt writes about what it means to be alive and in pain, to move through incomprehensible suffering and in spite of it all- find clarity and purpose and eventually joy. As Hewitt puts it, "The smoke smelled first acrid, and then sweet."

Another aspect of this memoir that I deeply appreciated was his incorporation of queer historical figures into the narrative. He seamlessly weaves between different story lines and time periods to create a well paced, elegant chronicle. As a Swedish American who has pretty so-so Swedish language skills but plenty of cultural knowledge, it was also a nice surprise to see so much Swedish culture and language included in the book.

This book is heavy and it deals graphically with many triggering topics. But this book is also hopeful, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. And despite the difficult topics addressed, I came away from this novel with a renewed perspective and more love in my heart- for the queer community, for all us living with mental illness, but most importantly, for myself.

If you liked these books, I think you will enjoy All Down Darkness Wide: Any Sally Rooney book, Luster by Raven Leilani, Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas, The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang, Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott, Seven Days in June by Tia Williams, Juniper & Thorn by Ava Reid, All The Things We Don't Talk About by Amy Feltman, Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, and The Pisces by Melissa Broder.

TWs: mentall illness (graphic), suicide attempt (graphic), suicidal ideation (graphic), homophobia (graphic), death of a parent, toxic relationship, death of a loved one, grief (graphic), drug abuse, forced institutionalization (graphic), pedophilia, medical content, injury/injury detail, sexual content, self harm, panic attacks, vomit, religious bigotry

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

A strong 3.5 stars because the gay mess was gay messing and I was living for it. But, on a more serious note, I really felt invested in how Sean Hewitt wrote about his relationship with his ex-boyfriend Elias. There’s something about his prose that made certain memories of their relationship feel so alive and fresh and immediate – like when they met and the leadup to their first kiss, I was screaming a little for real. I also appreciated Hewitt’s honest writing about what it's like to be in a relationship with someone suffering from severe mental illness. I thought this memoir was at its strongest when it focused in on Sean’s relationship with Elias.

That said, even though I was invested in the gay drama, I have to be honest and share that I found other elements of the memoir weaker. While Hewitt did write about himself and his own insecurities, I found the self-reflection a bit shallower and unresolved. Like sure he struggled with insecurity related to his sexual orientation and that’s totally legitimate, though I wanted more than just a disclosure about that insecurity – where was the growth or the attempt at growth? I also found it odd that Hewitt glossed over the end of his relationship with Elias. Obviously it’s his memoir and he chooses what to share and what not to share, but it seemed stylistically odd to not include more details about what solidified their incompatibility.

Anyway, 3.5 rounded up to 4 because when Hewitt’s writing is at its strongest, it really is emotionally captivating. Yay for reading gay books even though Pride Month is over!

[Olivia Loccisano · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most beautiful and poetic memoir you will ever read… Seán Hewitt creates a work of art in this hauntingly poetic book about loss, love and meaning. Most of the memoir explores the complicated emotions involved in his relationship with Elias, a man crippled with severe depression. Seán is a lover, a partner and a caregiver as depression eats at someone he truly loves. About Elias, he astutely explains: “He was both the man I loved and the person who wanted to kill the man I loved.”

If you loved A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, you NEED to read All Down Darkness Wide as it exhumes the emotions and reflections of Willem and Jude, while being very much its own unique entity.

Exploring LGBTQ shame, mental illness, coming of age, religion, and loss, this is an extremely special memoir that I recommend to everyone.

[od1_40reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. I now have a crush on Seán Hewitt.

[Ricky Schneider · Rating 5 out of 5]

All Down Darkness Wide is a gorgeous and devastating depiction of author and poet Sean Hewitt's intensely relatable trauma transmuted through his lyrical prose. He is an Irish Queer writer, lecturer at Trinity Dublin and poetry critic for the Irish Times. Looking at this young, attractive and accomplished man, you would never imagine the breadth of his experience and the darkness that he has lived with. This memoir is an artful interpretation of Hewitt's grief for his father, the guilt and anxiety of caring for a mentally ill lover and his journey toward acknowledging and accepting his own queerness.

The language is sometimes straight-forward and even conventional before morphing into something almost fantastical in his descriptions of nature and place. The book takes you with Sean as he lives in Liverpool, Colombia and Sweden and each location is vividly and viscerally rendered. His coming of age gives way to another kind of formative gauntlet as he falls in love and then is faced with the cruel and heartbreaking face of depression. As someone who has dealt with this affliction myself, the representation of that experience is so affirming and realistic that it moved me to tears. I was gripped with his boyfriend's struggle and my heart ached for Sean as well. I have no doubt that I will be thinking of Elias for years to come but for now he represents a mirror of my own battles with depression that showed me what that looks like from the eyes of those who care for you and gifts me with the desperately necessary recognition that I and none of us is ever alone.

Much of this book is colored with the author's affinity for poetry and poets. Hewitt often quotes lines that are meaningful and relevant to him and he even includes whole passages of poems that tie his own experiences to a long lineage of queer poets who have wrestled with similar demons throughout history. All of this creates a haunting aura around his story with embellishments of artistic symmetry that enhance and bolster his own beautiful way of reckoning with life and death.

This was a magnificent read full of emotional acuity and almost mystical beauty. The subject matter is dark and difficult but the language is so stunningly poignant and skilful that it is more than worth the heartache. All Down Darkness Wide is an affecting and artistic account of queerness, mental illness and grief that I will cherish for the rest of my life. It's a wonderful privilege to marvel at how Hewitt finds such beauty and art in his trauma and in writing this tender story, he is somehow able to heal himself and the reader as well.

[leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

there is an unmistakable melody running through the pages of all down darkness wide, its masterful grasp on language and emotional resonance making it clear that it emerged from the mind of a poet.

as a memoir, it is incredibly ambitious in terms of what it explores, delving into the complexities of the human experience, and more specifically, the experience of being a queer person navigating the world while simultaneously coping with the trauma that it bears. hewitt intersects his own personal life history with lgbtq+ history, leaning on voices from the queer literature canon, such as poets gerard manley hopkins and karin boye, in order to understand his queer identity and examine how queer history has shaped his life and experiences, whether consciously or otherwise.

the bulk of this memoir focuses on hewitt’s relationship with elias, a swedish man he meets while on a backpacking trip in south america. at first the book feels like a gay coming-of-age story, but when elias’ struggle with depression becomes apparent and the relationship heads into devastation, the book serves as a reminder of the mental health crisis amongst the lgbtq+ community.

some of the most powerful but also the most heartbreaking moments in the book derive from the accounts of sean and elias’ relationship. it often feels like nothing can explain the pain of loving someone who’s suffering, of so desperately wanting to be their saviour, their life raft, but knowing they need to learn to stay afloat for their own sake. that desperation is so acute, but hewitt captures it in these pages with such beautiful precision and tenderness.

though pain and suffering is not beautiful, it can be expressed beautifully through the written word - which hewitt masterfully exemplifies in this memoir. all down darkness wide is an incredibly moving and haunting meditation on grief, love, mental illness, queer discovery and queer heartbreak, but also a searing portrait of love and self-acceptance.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ll start off by saying that it’s always very tricky to give a rating to a memoir: how can you give a rating out of 5 stars to someone’s lived experiences, especially regarding mental health? And so, my rating is based on how Hewitt recounted the experiences from a narrative POV and the impact it had on me. As with all ratings, this one will of course be subjective, but even more so due to the nature of this memoir.

First off, huge TW for suicide and mental health. I knew these themes would be touched upon going into it, but I didn’t realise to what extent. This is no means a light hearted memoir, and the depressive tone doesn’t change from the get go.

Secondly, the writing is exquisite and drips with metaphor and poetry. I really recommend listening to this on audiobook narrated by the author, as his lilting voice really enhanced the story for me.

One of the main themes discussed is growing up gay in a heterosexual world, and the many complex issues that come with this. I could identify with Hewitt’s passages relating to this theme and his reflections on discovering one’s sexuality and what it means for the individual.

The issue I had was that I failed to understand the point of many of the passages revolving his ex-boyfriend. Without spoiling too much, Hewitt was in a very damaging relationship and the passages felt quite repetitive in describing the ex-boyfriend’s mental illness without a certain objective to it. I don’t want to trivialise mental illness in any way - it is a lived reality for many people and it is important to be discussed. But from a narrative point of view, there didn’t feel like there was a particular point or aim to give these passages structure or any enough comments or reflections in hindsight.

Also, the tone rarely changes from the beginning, which made sections feel flat. But maybe that is the point to reflect the stagnant nature of depression. For me, however, the reading experience was lethargic in places, although the writing was very beautiful.

As stated previously, memoirs are highly, highly subjective and so my rating reflects what I personally got out of it and perhaps what I was wanting when I went in.

[Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning and incredible. One of the best memoirs I've ever read.

[Mark Kwesi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm absolutely in love with this beautiful, devastating memoir. The writing is among the most vulnerable I've ever come across. My favourite book so far in 2022.

[Sebastian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was something very special, a beautifully written account of queer loneliness, depression and the power of small joys in life. I was literally in awe of Sean's unique talent to convey multifaceted, incredibly complex emotions in such a compact, to-the-point memoir. Now I am impatiently awaiting his first debut novel.

[Natalia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well it's definitely a remarkably beautifully written book - some passages really read like poetry with abundance of interesting rhetorical figures. The descriptions of characters feelings are very insightful, thoughtful and kind of on-spot.

It's a book that though doesn't really deliver too big or long of a story, it broaches upon a number of subjects that are recounted intermittently with sort of overlapping narrative lines - one is sure gay childhood, coming of age and coming to terms with being gay AND catholic, realizing one's thereby engendered latent internalised homophobia and leading this double life - kind of "growing into" one's actual self through coming out and then realizing living in hiding for so many years e.g. with one's family had in a way truncated the character's self into those seemingly real parts and those adopted for survival in a society built upon a premise of heterosexuality and this part especially is STUNNINGLY written - I loved every part of the childhood flashbacks and ruminations. Then we have the story line involving sexual initiation, entering - while still living under huge burden of isolation - crusing scene, first boyfriends and fascinations, etc. The narrator - here the author himself as this is supposedly an anonymized and edited memoir - also often dwells upon his poetry-related academic work and last but not least there's the biggest trunk of Elias story, his spiraling into depression and overly theatrical suicide "attempt" that really wasn't one. In the latter it's especially insightful in how Elias's disorder eventually makes everyone around him sick and paranoid - the narrator included.

It's really a beautiful and very smart book - recommendable not only for those interested into LGBTQ community stories. It's also fresh in how, uncharacteristically this m/m queer story doesn't eventually lead to porn of any sort, like it often happens in gay books.

[Reid Page-McTurner · Rating 1 out of 5]

REVIEW: Diary of a Wimpy Kid. I couldn’t connect with Sean Hewitt, And to be honest I found him very offputting as a narrator. He was so sappy, whiny, and passive.
I found it boring, self-indulgent, and oh-so-pretentious. It opens with him giving a stranger a BJ and then segues through 3 more sex scenes with randoms in the first 45 pages. Then he tells you his ex tried to commit suicide; and then we are explained these events while he runinates on poetry. 🙄 TBH I am tiring of these gifted literary gays writing the same nonsense: ‘I’m queer and nerdy but I still pull hot guys; oh yeah, now I’ll tell you a sad story.’ I’m not entirely sure there’s much of a book here, there’s no narrative drive. The characters do very little. They buy furniture, they drive through the woods. They read poetry: Let’s just do a 5 page meditation on some gay poet during your partner’s suicide attempt, sounds right to me, Sean. I abandoned it at 85%. 😴 1.5/5
—
#bookstagram #bookstagramuk #goodreads #alldowndarknesswide #bookreview #bookreviews #reading #lgbtbooks #lgbtliterature

[ali (hiatus) garcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

haunting, tragic and beautiful. breathtaking writing detailing the heartbreaks of life, while exploring what it means to the author to be a part of the LGBTQ+ community in religious northern england. so happy i picked this up for pride month, i truly hope everyone gets a chance to read this!

*pls check trigger warnings!

[Daniel Myatt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was beautiful and haunting!

I don't know how to explain but it felt like it was my journey, that I was sharing it rather then reading it.

You can tell this author is a wordsmith :)

[Kyle C · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a skeptical reader of this memoir. When it was first recommended to me, I wondered what experiences and insights a thirty-four-year old would have to share. It feels like a premature age for critical perspective and self-knowledge, a retrospective that is in medias res. Having finished it, I feel split. Seán Hewitt's memoir is a beautifully written and poignant story with two dramatic epicenters: 1) his early adolescence coming to terms with sexuality and 2) his first long-term relationship with a Swedish man, Elias, a gregarious globe-trotter who descends into clinical depression when they move in together in Gothenburg. Seán Hewitt writes with a poet's perceptiveness, mining his experience from childhood and early adulthood and painstakingly probing his mind's every turn. It is a memoir that minutely captures what it was like to grow up gay in the early 2000s and what it is like to care for someone suffering from depression (to feel as if "one's happiness is no longer one's own"). At the same time, I couldn't help but feel that there was more poetic gilding than substance, something almost rote and elementary about his self-insights. The epilogue, in which he describes a photo of himself and notices a caterpillar on his sleeve, becomes an obvious symbol for his own change and metamorphosis, the chrysalis maturing into something new. It is a memoir given to metaphor in lieu of bare candor. I also cringed at some of the trite cliches (such as when he describes a threesome as "a sort of trinity, loosening and tightening, as though between us we might dissolve the boundaries of the self"—over-written and absurdly grandiloquent).

That aside, Hewitt's novel resonated with me profoundly. When he describes what it was like hearing debates about same-sex marriage fought in the public square, hearing denunciations of homosexuality from the pulpit, he hits on exactly what many gay youth felt in the moment: the deeply internalized sense of public shaming, the paranoid sense of being personally vilified in the media:

The shock of being debated, of being fought both for and against, of being subjected to constant conversation, made me feel exposed and degraded.

Like many gay men, Hewitt sublimated, hiding his sexuality and investing his energy into other pursuits, into school and reading and poetry. I am reminded here of Edouard Louis who recounts how his homosexuality paradoxically turned him middle-class, making him not only want to get out from, but to rise above, his working-class home and origins. Educational success and advancement are not simply a matter of ambition but a necessity for survival for gay boys. As he explains,

While I boxed off the parts of myself I knew I couldn't let show, I magnified others, over-identifying with anything I might use as protection. Education, religion, middle-class privilege, anything I could get hold of. They were my suit of armor, the uniform of my cohesion. That early sense of shame was underground: in protecting myself, in choosing which parts of myself to hide and which to magnify, I fragmented myself. I made a hierarchy of each facet of my identity, and at the bottom of the shaky unstable tower I called "myself" there was a little locked box.

Hewitt rightly notes the strange sense of in-betweenness that many gay men felt growing up in the 90s and 2000s—hovering on the precipice of gay rights. Homosexuality was now legal but still stigmatized, and same-sex marriage was highly contentious; there was more push for "tolerance" and "acceptance" (that was the parlance of the time) but very little affirmation and support. Homophobia was condemned but few students would feel comfortable or safe being out at their schools. Gay youth of the 2000s grew up under the shadow of AIDs and they saw little positive representation of queerness on television (I would furtively record episodes of Queer as Folk which played at midnight). General media provided no sense of destiny beyond the tragic stories of Matthew Shepherd and Bobby Griffith. I myself felt desperately alone; I had no idea what a gay relationship would look like. Hewitt speaks for many when he says,

These stoppings and startings, these gradual assays into sex, were often lonely and unshared, and seemed every time to be more daring, pushing me outside the bounds of what my straight peers were doing, or not doing, and I only learnt later that this was a feeling shared by many queer people—a sense of lonely discovery, followed by the light of community.

But as Hewitt observes, that sense of community was also fractious. When I first came out to my father, he asked if I was like those people at the nudist beach near his house and I had to explain "Oh no, I'm not like them." What my father was tacitly asking, and what I was elliptically answering, was the question of whether "gay" also meant flamboyant, camp, promiscuous, hypersexual, abnormal. For so many youth, coming out doesn't simply entail the words "I'm gay" but also comes with fudging qualifiers and apologetic disclaimers: "I'm not that gay" or "I'm not that kind of gay" or "I'm gay but I hate drag". Hewitt perfectly describes the high-wire acrobatics of coming out, of disclosing one's sexuality but dissociating from the queer community:

When I first came out, I distanced myself from other queer people; I insisted to friends and family that I was not like them. I was normal—a mantra that I repeated over and over to myself. I was good and good meant not queer.

Nowadays we talk about "affinity groups" and "marginalized communities" but queerness is fundamentally different from racial identities and other minorities. One often discovers that one is queer, gay or trans, before one even knows another queer, gay or trans person, and a heteronormative upbringing makes solidarity with other queer people seem taboo (gay boys, especially, learn about their identities as slurs before they even know what those slurs refer to; gay boys are pressured to avoid "sissies" long before they understand what they have in common with one another; and, in the conservative media, queerness is often paired with pedophilia). So queer people then spend much of their early adolescence figuring out what their identity means, if they event want it to be an identity:

Queerness involved a process of becoming, undertaken in a world built around heterosexuality, and so that process happened in no small part through the ways I butted up against the world I lived in. Sexuality was constructed into selfhood, into identity.

In short, this is an elegantly written, deeply relatable memoir. At times, it lacks sober nuance and it is given to cliche, but, for me, it distills the experience of queerness in the narrow timeframe of the early aughts.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

So relieved to have finished this. Objectively a good memoir but very much not the right time for me to pick this up… some beautiful writing but some sections were pretty bleak.

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I die, I want this added to a list entitled “things that changed his life.”

This memoir, written by the poet Sean Hewitt, really is quite an achievement. An ode to love, loss, poetry, queerness, shame, bodies, mental health, family, transformations, memory and the beauty of reclaiming something we didn’t lose, but purposefully left behind.

[Aaron Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot express how beautifully written this book is and how much it has affected me.

One of those rare books where you start casually reading and suddenly you're 100 pages in, totally engrossed.

Even though it's a memoir, at times it felt i was reading the story of my life.

It's going to be a while before this book's ghost will leave me.

[That One Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This memoir is haunting, yet beautiful. It’s raw and vulnerable in ways that so many other memoirs aim to be and come up short.
Much of that beauty is in Hewitt’s writing. He is able to capture emotion in a way unrivaled.
What an amazing exploration of love, shame, grief, trauma and nearly every emotion in between.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Darkness does rule this story. The word dark appears more times than there a pages in this book. The book title comes from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "The Lantern out of Doors":
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?

(realized I put a bit too much of the story here in my review, so I'll hide it as spoiler)

Hewitt is studying the poetry of Hopkins. Hopkins joined the church and became a Jesuit, as well as professor of Greek and Latin at University College Dublin. Hewitt himself teaches at Trinity College Dublin, and almost took the priest path.

It seems that Hopkins and Hewitt both shared queer lifestyles too. Hopkins curtailed his quickly, as his journal talked of his early infatuation with his younger cousin. Hewitt describes his hiding in the darkness to find men.

I kept feeling that Hewitt felt shame in being queer, per pressure from family and neighbors, and society in general. He first finds a very openly gay classmate Jack at Cambridge. But Jack seems to be having too much fun playing the field. Yet Hewitt still thinks idealistically of him. After leaving University, and not seeing Jack for a long time, Sean is devastated to stumble onto Jack's obituary.

Sean lived a life of fantasy at Cambridge. A friend of Jack's (Hasan) told Sean:
about coming to Cambridge and how he had felt a sense of escape. He could be someone else here. He could be many different people if he wanted to be. The pretense of the place was, not surprisingly, conducive to pretending.

This describes Jack, and Hasan, and even Sean (as well as for many other University students), who get wrapped up in the life of a fast-paced, fun loving student.

My individuality seemed so caught up with academia that I wasn't quite sure how to frame it once I'd graduated.

Sean went home to his parents upon graduation and worked as a clerk for menial pay as his fun college days were gone. He saved enough money to travel to Columbia and Peru area, where he met Elias.

Elias sounds a bit like Jack: in-shape and fun to be around. But it sounds like Elias is not paying much attention to Sean, as their travel paths meet, and diverge, then meet again, and finally diverge as Sean runs out of money and returns home.

Sean fell for Elias too quickly, imho. Upon first site in South America, as Elias arrived at a campsite and was unpacking and finding a bed:
He had tanned skin and long, dark brown hair. I watched quietly as he arranged his things, climbed into the top bunk and fell to sleep. He was youthful in the way all tanned boys are. I saw him dreamily and watched him for a while, and then dozed back to sleep.

Their travel paths criss-crossed, and upon seeing him in the next travel point:
I tried to meet him with a mirror of his own aloofness, to be cool, to act as though I hadn't spent every intervening hour anticipating the next time I'd see him.

Sean and Elias traveled together about 2 months in South America before Sean had to go home.

Once Elias returns to Sweden, Sean goes to Sweden to be with Elias. But Elias' health experiences the same darkness of the seasonal darkness of living at 60 degrees N latitude, where nightfall comes very early. Elias' depression dominates this book. Elias is in 156 of the 229 pages of this book, but we never really learn how/why Elias got so bad. The breakup of this pair comes from an exhausted Sean as he says:
Early one December, when he was visiting me in England, we admitted finally that some things could not be fixed.

I really expected to get better resolution on what happened with Elias' life after Sean left, but the book concludes with Sean at his mother's a couple years after his father dies, flipping through family pictures, and feeling sad. He is wistful of the pictures showing him as an innocent, happy, and highly inquisitive little boy.

This book read too much like a log of what happened. There is not enough reflection, nor analysis of two lost loves. It sounded like both these boyfriends were not good choices for Sean.

The writing also took on a Victorian feel, with extremely long sentences.
e.g. the 4th, 5th and 6th sentences of the book have, respectively:
- 54 words and 4 commas
- 71 words and 6 commas
- 51 words and 4 commas

It is sad that both Sean and Elias didn't want to "admit" that Elias was getting mental-health aid at the hospital. They lied to all their friends, never telling them what was really going on with Elias (and thus Sean's) disappearance from their social scene.

Sean continued to work on some poetry translations, and stumbles onto the fact that he and Elias are reading Karin Boye's works. Boye died taking sleeping pills. Her partner Margot gassed herself by month's end. 10 weeks later their friend Anita died. This is NOT the kind of stuff Elias (in the hospital for severe depression) should ever have been reading.

I really expected to read a worse ending for Elias. But I'm torn since I actually read NO end for Elias, although he dominated 75% of this book.

I can only go 3* on this one. Maybe I'll read some other reviews once I post this, to try to gather how/why other readers gave better scores. I was not a fan of the writing style, and the story was rather depressing. I like heartaches, but not depression - especially completely unexplained depression.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a remarkably beautiful memoir of the highest emotional and literary caliber. Seán documents a life navigating the demands both for gay openness and gay shame, and of the twinned elements of desire and disgust undergirding his and others’ relational lives. This is a deeply literary memoir as well as a thickly emotional one: braided with a vivid archive of life with an emotionally abusive, chronically suicidal partner is a story of language gained and lost, literary discovery, and deep investigation into the discourses of queerness in the shadow of the Catholic Church.

So too does a fascinating conversation on bodily autonomy, creative freedom, and responsibility emerge in the tensions between Seán and Elias, as well as their respective ideas of one another — suicide becomes in many ways the untranslatable language standing between the two, and yet, remains the glue binding them terribly to one another.

Emerging from a marathon-read, I feel I have new tools — or maybe the clay to be shaped with them - with which to investigate my own relationship to my childself, and to be a more astute reader of the texts which collectively compose the selves I will become.

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Torn between 4 or 4.5 stars - more detailed review to come. A really powerful and moving memoir.

Really enjoyed this despite having minimal contextual knowledge about the poets and religion that are central to the memoir. The writing is absolutely beautiful and reflective and I love how history is integrated into this; my main critique is that the storytelling felt a bit fragmented and oddly paced. I think I would have appreciated more bridges between sections so the gaps in time didn’t feel so abrupt.

[Emmkay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written queer coming-of-age memoir by poet Sean Hewitt. At its core is a formative relationship with Elias, a seemingly free and gregarious young Swedish man Hewitt meets while travelling and falls in love with. Eventually they move in together, and Elias’ struggle with depression and suicidality has a great impact on his partner. Hewitt writes movingly of Elias’ mental illness and his own difficulty coping.

There’s also so much else to the book. There’s gorgeously vivid writing about places (the pine forests and fog of Swedish suburbs, a nighttime tryst in a Liverpool cemetery). There’s Hewitt’s thoughtful description of the impact of growing up gay in a town where he knows no other gay people. There’s quite a lot about poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, about whom Hewitt was writing his thesis when he moved to Sweden, and who was a closeted Jesuit priest - and also a lot about a Swedish poet I hadn’t heard of before, Karin Boye, an icon in the town Hewitt moved to, whose poems he and his partner translate together during the long difficult evenings after Elias’ release from hospital. Things I was happy to learn more about, thoughtfully written.

[on growing up gay]“When they said, ‘I’m just scared that you’ll be unhappy,’ what I really felt they were saying was ‘I am scared that if you continue being yourself, we will make you unhappy.’ A sort of threat, veiled as a kindness.”

“So, starved and depleted and driven to invention, I turned to the one repository of images I had access to: those of my own body. Looking in the mirror, positioning myself so that my face wasn’t reflected back at me, I would focus on a part of my body and imagine it to be the body of some other man. In that way, I came to know my body in two separate ways, both as the thing I lived inside and also as a thing very close to what I desired in other men. But this was never narcissistic; in fact, I had to focus intently on the body I was looking at not being mine.”

[Kendrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

A highly anticipated read that I thoroughly enjoyed. Also, a quick shout out to the cover art: a beautiful rondo of Phaeton from Hendrick Goltzius's The Four Disgracers. Appropriate for the themes of this book -- a descent into darkness, a loss of light. Reflecting on his time coming out as a gay man and also his time in Sweden with a lover suffering from depression, I thought Hewitt was honest in confronting his past internalized homophobia and lack of understanding around mental illness. The point of a memoir is not to valorize oneself, but to get out of the way of your own story and let it be told.

It is difficult to sensitively discuss a personal relationship for a public audience, so I am sympathetic that what is left off the final book. With that in mind, I found the first half of the book - where Hewitt writes about his youth, the anonymous encounters he has, and the unfurling of his queerness at Oxford - the standout. The 'Sean and Elias' half (no less well-written) is told with a slightly broader brushstroke necessary to protect the privacy of Hewitt and his then-partner, but I anticipate some readers wanting 'more' than what was given. This is especially so with the way press reviews have focused on the relationship as the narrative core (not untrue, but a disservice to the other wonderful meditations in the book). It builds expectations which I don't think this book is necessarily able or willing to meet.

I will see if I end up losing as many copies of this to my friends and colleaguess as I have Lantern (3 copies) and Tongues of Fire (4 copies).

[Liina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sean Hewitt’s memoir All Down Darkness Wide turned out to be one the best things I read this year. I flew through it in airplanes and airports during my recent holiday. It is unusual to come across a memoir that is so engrossing that you forget everything around you. Its incredibly poetic descriptions of rooms, cities, and characters are so well done that I felt transported there instantly. You can tell that Hewitt is a poet first and foremost. There was animalistic beauty in Colombia he describes and the Swedish winter - living through the horriblis that is a Northern winter each year I can say that it is one of the rare occasions where an author has understood exactly how it feels. Cocooned in, everything is either blistering cold or eerily foggy. At the same time, it is comforting too, to be cozy and create your own little separate world inside a bigger one.

The memoir consists of different vignettes and time periods that focus on queer identity, living with depression, and coming to terms with one’s past. The main bulk of the book is about Hewitt’s relationship with his partner who suffers from depression. It nearly brought me to tears, to read about the hurt and ambivalent feelings that he went through after his partner nearly committed suicide, written with no barrier, no agenda but with complete honesty. He also delves deep into something that I don’t think we speak nearly enough about - how something that did not happen but almost did can be extremely traumatic too. How the non-event can hang above us like a dark cloud, unspeakable and seemingly not there because “the worst was avoided”.
It is a memoir for everyone who has smoked too many cigarettes on the damp cold winter eve, hands red from cold, to those who drink to forget although they know it is a substitute solution, to those who have loved despite it would be easier to walk away.

[Colby · Rating 5 out of 5]

seán hewitt’s debut memoir all down darkness wide is a gorgeously written and evocative meditation on queerness, love, mental health, the natural world, and self-discovery in a world that feels dedicated to stand against us. laced through seán’s own experiences are the poems and lives of two poets—gerard manley hopkins and karin boye—whose relationships to queerness reflect the shame, pain, and grief that we all grew up alongside and all forever hope we will be able to step away from.

in chronicling his journey from a childhood spent hiding to an adulthood mapping out the possibilities of his future, hewitt has written one of my favorite memoirs i’ve ever read. this book found me when i needed it most, explained to me things i’ve never managed to find the words for, and set up shop in my heart for whenever i need to return to it for reassuring thoughts, for painful yet necessary reflections, or just to realize that in all the complex cartography of my life, i’m not alone. there is someone who has experienced these feelings before and his words found me and lifted me up from the darkness for a while, so that i could breathe.

there’s no greater gift a book can give than this.

thank you to edelweiss+ and to penguin press for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Julieta · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Ghosts in the water, ghosts in the blood. Everything, once you start to look, is haunted.”

Probably my favorite memoir i've ever read.

[Alistair Mackay · Rating 5 out of 5]

You’d swear I was studying for an exam on this book, the way I’ve underlined so much of it. It’s the most magical, intimate thing when an author shares a memoir like this, and heart-racing stuff for me to see so much of my own experience and consciousness in his. A book about the buried pain of queer life, the fragility of hope, and what it’s like to love someone who is deeply depressed. Hewitt raises this experience into something sacred with his prose and his kindness. Absolutely beautiful.