All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir

(Hardback)

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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. 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 Sean 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, Sean 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.

Reviews

Hewitt's book is excellent... It makes one hope this is the beginning of a wonderful trend of men writing about love with the same intense vulnerability that women have for decades now... [Hewitt] shows himself to be one of our foremost memoirists... A stunning meditation on love and heartbreak, this feels like an essential work of the new Irish queer canon. Let us hope it is but a first volume, the beginning of a vast work. * Sunday Times *
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 * New York Times *
[An] extraordinary memoir... All Down Darkness Wide is not about answers. It does not offer glib consolations and is all the more powerful and affecting for that. * Observer *
Some of the most beautiful prose I've read in years... intensely original. -- Alexander Chee * The Atlantic *
[P]oignant and painful, rigorous and sensual... Hewitt has forged a life-enhancing memoir... This book stands alongside Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast as an outstanding chronicle of a gay poet's journey of self-discovery. -- Michael Arditti * The Spectator *
A book glittering with beguiling detail... Discursive yet succinct, humane, unsparing of its author, All Down Darkness Wide will surely take its place alongside H is for Hawk as a hard-to-categorise memoir hybrid whose sales will catch fire through word-of-mouth recommendations. -- Patrick Gale * Irish Times *
Sen 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... 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 Tibn, author of THE MAGICIAN
Sen Hewitt's memoir is extraordinarily beautiful... moving, and humane; it is the best new work of non-fiction 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. [A] writer whose work will continue to be treasured long after our lifetimes. A wonder. -- Doireann N Ghrofa, author of A GHOST IN THE THROAT
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
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
It's impossible not to be intensely moved by this book, written with a poet's eye for detail... 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
[A] very beautiful, very intelligent book. It is of course a moving portrait of very human fragilities, but it also testifies to the power of the heart and mind to survive all kinds of grief and emerge with much of value to say to the world. -- Okechukwu Nzelu, author of HERE AGAIN NOW
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... 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
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
It's a book that 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. -- Charlie Gilmour, author of FEATHERHOOD
Hewitt's poetic sensibility gives this exploration of empathy a lovely long, and mature cadence. He is a very wise child indeed. -- Anne Enright, Irish Times, Books of the Year 2022
Raw and hypnotic... 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. * Publishers Weekly *
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. -- Harpers Magazine * Claire Messud *
[A] remarkable book, haunting... extraordinary and simply unforgettable. * Booklist (starred review) *

Author Bio

Born in 1990, Sean Hewitt was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022. His debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire (2020), won the Laurel Prize, and he was chosen by the Sunday Times as one of their '30 under 30' artists in Ireland and shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (2022), was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards, and for the Foyles Book of the Year in non-fiction. A book critic for the Irish Times, he teaches Modern British & Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin.