All Down Darkness Wide

At turns painful, at turns soaring, an ambitious memoir debut from one of Irish literature's rising stars, Seán Hewitt

Filling aimless post-grad months at a hostel in Colombia, Seán Hewitt watched a new arrival climb into the top bunk late one night. The next morning he quietly adjusted the curtains to preserve the darkness for the man the reader comes to know as Elias. That protective and caring gesture would mark the first and foundational act of their relationship.


But this mythologized peace would not last. The abstract statistic that queer young adults are five times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers is made terrifyingly concrete on the winter morning of Elias's 27th birthday, when he goes in secret to his family's cabin by the North Sea with a bottle of rum and a backpack of pills.


Hewitt arrives at the eleventh hour and in the aftermath of that terrible day he confronts the profound rupture rent by this suicide attempt, endeavoring to mend and to understand it. From a sacred grotto in the Pyrenees, to a 19th Century cemetery in Liverpool, to that seaside cabin, ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE is haunted by the rites of Catholicism, by the veiled threat in the words "I'm just scared that you will be unhappy," and by generations of queer men and women, closeted and ostracized.


It is a perceptive and unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets true 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. It asks what love can endure, and what it simply cannot.


Yet, the voice is alive to hidden corners of beauty as only a poet can be. Hewitt captures transcendent moments in nature with exquisite lyricism. And, he provides a masterclass in the incredible power of unsparing specificity. ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE illuminates a path ahead for queer literature and for the literature of heartbreak, and strikes a piercing and resonant chord for all who trace Hewitt's careful footsteps.

Story Locale: Cambridge, UK / Colombia / Liverpool, UK / Gothenburg, Sweden / Lourdes, France