All Down Darkness Wide

A Memoir

By: Seán Hewitt

Narrated by: Seán Hewitt

Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

Winner of the 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 • Lammy Finalist

“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.

©2022 Seán Hewitt (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"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

“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

Stunning

An absolutely beautiful book. I’m at a loss for words to adequately describe the feelings and recognitions stirred up by this story. Truly one of the greatest books I’ve had the fortune to find.

The very deepest end of the pool

I’m at a loss where to begin. Maybe, an hour or so into listening to Sean, I hit the pause and reflect button…Do I want to go further? Without conscious intention, I listened to another memoirist who’s literary style is also a life of relationship introspections that are only slightly dark but otherwise hyper-comical in an over the top, gay, kind-of-way.
I’m now ready to jump back into “All
Down Darkness” which, I discover, takes a lot more time and a lot more studied concentration to fully appreciate the immersive and emotionally gut wrenching moments
depicted by this gifted young man, young author, who dies for our sins to save the life of the man he loves.
I have never, ever, been more touched by anything read or listened too before. I didn’t know where to begin and quite frankly am averse to offering any glib summation beyond my personal opinion, that “All Down Darkness” is nothing short of a masterpiece.

Layers of meaning

This is not a story about gay relationships, it is a story about relationships. It is poetic in the layers of meaning, (the explanation of the translation of a poem is ridiculously rich in this regard). This is a work of art.

Visceral

I hesitate to write a review, given how this book is a memoir of deeply personal journeys, often down dark and painful paths. My fear is to not do justice to the actual experiences described.

But I would feel remiss not acknowledging the monumental work that this is, reveling in joyful times and unyieldingly direct about the times when darkness engulfed the lives of the author and the man with whom he had built a life together.

Throughout, I appreciated the way Mr. Hewitt searches for messages and context about what is happening to him in the experiences he's had, lessons he's been taught and literature he has read.

His narrative prowess is concise and poetic, and I loved his cross referencing to other cultural works, like the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

While the story is wrenching, it also opens the heart and mind to exploration of all the existential questions that so many repressed people (LGBT+, in this example) grapple with. Overlay those with the added pain and burdens brought on by depression and mental illness, and the weight seems unbearable.

Beyond my appreciation of the book's excellent writing quality, I also hope that relief and light - and love - are coming back to the lives of author and his loved ones.