All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir

<b>&ldquo;Exquisitely written.&rdquo; &mdash;Claire Messud, <b><i>Harper&rsquo;s Magazine</i></b><br>&#160;<br><b>Named a Best Book of July by <i>Buzzfeed </i>* A <i>Publishers Weekly </i>Best Nonfiction 2022 Summer Read * <i>Observer </i>Book of the Week</b><br><b>By turns devastating and soaring, an ambitious memoir debut from one of Irish literature&rsquo;s rising stars</b></b><br>When Sea&#769;n 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.<br><i>All Down Darkness Wide </i>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&rsquo;s like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one&rsquo;s deep depression. As lives are made and unmade, this memoir asks what love can endure and what it cannot.<br>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.<br>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. <i>All Down Darkness Wide </i>illuminates a path ahead for queer literature and for the literature of heartbreak, striking a piercing and resonant chord for all who trace Hewitt&rsquo;s dauntless footsteps.