Reviews

All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt

Only show reviews with written explanations

curlyhairedbooklover's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

clairemariarose's review against another edition

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5.0

me: rating nonfiction is weird and makes me uncomfy

also me: cannot give this book anything less than five stars because it’s both beautiful and harrowing and it left me speechless

amandaaurigemma's review against another edition

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Memorable Quotes:
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The world I had defended - and into which I intertwined myself - did not love me. I knew that now. Still, they had something I wanted: they had stolen my God from me. That idea of God, of a world that, if touched rightly, might 'give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him', was something I couldn't let go of. I would steal my God back. I would run with him through the burning streets.

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I had looked too long into the darkness and the darkness had looked back.

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It was unbearable to listen, unbearable to be passive when he was slipping away, unbearable to watch him drowning and not hold out my hand, not to take his, not to try with all my strength to haul him back to the light.

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Love was like a moon, waxing and waning - sometimes her depression seemed to eclipse it, other times it seemed to brighten it through the sheer force of contrast.

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I thought that perhaps a symbol of hope, even if it were not the real thing, might take hope's place, might masquerade long enough to matter.

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The delicate, fragile quality of happiness, I learnt once more, was its briefness.

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If I cannot change the structures of the world, if I cannot bend the will of heaven, perhaps I can move the river, perhaps I can move hell.

brnineworms's review against another edition

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dark emotional inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

“Ghosts in the water, ghosts in the blood. Everything, once you start to look, is haunted.”

A beautifully written memoir, moving and evocative. I love the water motif, the way the weather sets the mood, the gothic quality of ghosts and graveyards. It feels right reading it at this time of year; I don’t often reread books, but I could see this becoming a late autumn tradition for me.

Hewitt is sympathetic – more so than I would have been in his situation, I know. He’s honest about his fear and anger without getting stuck in it. His writing is deeply personal but he also relates his experiences to The Queer Experience more broadly, with musings on the closet, on assimilation, and how our survival strategies protect us at the cost of eroding our Selves.

It hits like cold rain. I needed it.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

Spoiler

depression, suicidality, grief, guilt, paranoia/panic, dependence on alcohol and smoking, unhealthy relationship, homophobia

shaunhutch's review against another edition

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challenging reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

gorecki's review against another edition

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5.0

There is a theory that from an evolutionary point of view, happy memories are not useful to us. That’s why we need to consciously work at remembering them, while at the same time we’re unable to forget the bad ones. Bad experience is useful because it helps us survive - we’re supposed to learn from it and know better next time.

But then when it comes to sad moments, hard moments, bad moment, ones that weigh us down, we’re always told to “let them all out”, to let go. Those experiences might be evolutionarily helpful lessons, but they’re a heavy burden to carry. The irony? We learn to survive from them, but we don’t often survive them to learn.

Love is a form of happiness we all want to cherish, but sometimes it has a dark undercurrent that drags us down to the very bottom. All Down Darkness Wide is the struggle between the two - between the need to keep the memory of a happy love alive while also letting all its darkness out so you can float back up and break the surface for air. Of learning to live again, even if only to live surrounded by ghosts.

We’re always smarter in hindsight. We see all the signs of things unavoidably collapsing around us only once we’re already standing on top of the rubble. And so does Hewitt, standing on top of what remains of his love for Elias, on top of the poetry of others who have walked similar paths before him, on top of some of the most poetic prose I’ve read in a while. Connecting love and darkness across centuries and countries, tying in the suffocating feelings of being a closeted gay boy in a small town and that of a love gone dark to the freeing feeling of coming out and swimming up from the bottom of that love to resurface again.

It might be just me, but I felt it. I felt him stand on top of this rubble and take his deep gulp of air and reclaiming himself from his ghosts. And then “a lantern moves along the night.”