All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir

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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 *

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.