Scan barcode
emzcbee's review
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Classism, Addiction, Alcoholism, Suicide attempt, Suicidal thoughts, Death, and Homophobia
Minor: Religious bigotry
thesawyerbean's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
An absolutely stunning memoir - Seán Hewitt stands on the shoulders of pre-eminent poets such as Hopkins and Karen Boye to meditate passionately on his life, his loves and his queerness.
It is harrowing in its portrayal of queer coming-of-age throttled by religious trauma and societal expectation. It lays bare the cycle of danger and self-destruction that many experience growing up, trying to live truthfully in a post-AIDS landscape:
“I, like others, held closer to a different truth: that the water contains the souls of the dead, trapped in the graveyard, and that it turns black, like blood, when boiled.
Ghosts in the water, ghosts in the blood. Everything, once you start to look, is haunted.”
Beauty bleeds from these pages, drawing from the natural world and his emotions to vividly describe his experiences - but revealing how this beauty can rot into something much darker: how the interweaving threads of your relationships can soon tighten into knots around your throat. His discussions on mental health, dependency and loss are heart-wrenching. Watching the fire of someone you love dwindle and flicker, feeling the guilt and the hollowness written with devastating lyricism.
“I would be afraid of [him], as though he was a new person now, or was inhabited by a new person; someone who might, at any moment, kill him. It was as though he was shadowed at every turn by an inversion of himself, someone who stalked his every thought and followed his every move, and whispered dark things in his ear. He was both the man I loved and the person who wanted to kill the man I loved.”
Ultimately, this is a book about reminiscence: remembering the ghosts of our past lovers and queer ancestors, the nostalgia for our devastation, the joyful memories that gleam through the fog in spite of it. Hewitt expertly underlines the magnificence of life despite the horrors, and shows us how to pick ourselves up and rebuild through his own experiences.
“For most of my life I had thought that all I could be sure of was the past. I think I had seen memory as a sort of route, a pathway, which stopped off at all the significant events of my life, and formed a narrative, explaining how I got to where I am, and how I got to be who I am. Like stepping stones across the river Lethe, there were some memories I held on to. Over all that river of forgetfulness - into which experiences, thoughts and words dropped every day - these memories made a crossing, some solid ground I could traverse. All those years, it was as though time were blowing through me and taking form, being winnowed into narrative.”
A masterful piece of writing: one that was personally affecting, and will no doubt stay with me for a long time.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Medical trauma, Outing, Self harm, Suicide attempt, Suicide, Addiction, Religious bigotry, Bullying, Drug use, Suicidal thoughts, Alcoholism, Medical content, Mental illness, Alcohol, Grief, Hate crime, Homophobia, Injury/Injury detail, Forced institutionalization, Chronic illness, Blood, Cancer, Death, Death of parent, and Toxic relationship
More...