All Down Darkness Wide
A Memoir
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Laurel Prize winner Hewitt (Tongues of Fire) mines the capriciousness of love and pain in this poignant reflection on living with a clinically depressed partner. Unable to find steady work after graduating Cambridge, Hewitt set off on a backpacking trip through South America, where he met Elias. The two quickly fell in love and Elias moved back to Liverpool with Hewitt, despite only knowing him for a short time. "It felt right," Hewitt writes. "I'd wanted so long to have someone like him." However, when the pair moved to Elias's native Sweden, a crisis unfolded as the Elias Hewitt knew, typically easygoing and boisterous, was ripped away by a struggle with depression that led to a suicide attempt. In a raw and hypnotic retelling reminiscent of Garth Greenwell's Cleanness, Hewitt recounts the turmoil of loving someone who "was shadowed at every turn by an inversion of himself," and whose depression he became ensnared in; over five years, Hewitt writes, "I was so numbed I was barely aware of its presence." Yet amid the devastation—which crescendos at their relationship's end—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.
