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alliegentry's review
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.0
A beautifully written, thought-provoking, and at times very sad reflection on queerness, homophobia, and shame, religion, spirituality, and mental health, and how these factors intertwine.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicidal thoughts and Mental illness
Moderate: Religious bigotry and Homophobia
robbie_d94's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mental illness, Suicidal thoughts, and Suicide attempt
njstew's review against another edition
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
4.5
Beautiful and intricately human
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mental illness, Suicide attempt, Suicidal thoughts, and Death of parent
Moderate: Sexual content, Homophobia, Grief, Adult/minor relationship, and Terminal illness
serenspace's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Homophobia, Suicide attempt, and Mental illness
carrotsarenot's review
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
Memoirs aren’t something I’m usually drawn to. For one thing, I tend to prefer fiction, but I also just don’t feel like I can often relate to or take much away from them. I know that’s probably not always the case and it isn’t always necessary to only read things that you can relate to, but I digress.
I initially picked up (and by that I mean checked out from the library) All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt as a means of research for a story I’m currently working on, so I was going in with more of a fact-finding mindset than I normally do while I’m reading something.
And although I continued to keep an eye out for relevant themes, settings, and feelings, I quickly slipped into reading simply for enjoyment. Well, it’s a bit of a dark book, so maybe enjoyment is the wrong word, but I was intrigued and pulled into the narrative Hewitt was beginning to weave.
He was able to tell his story in such a thoughtful, retrospective, and poetic way that there were many times where I got lost in the pages, feeling like I was reliving Hewitt’s memories myself.
At times, though, reliving those memories felt like a slog. I’m sure that the heavy, dragging pace was somewhat intentional as I got deeper into the story, but it made some parts quite hard to get through. Even towards the beginning, in a lighter part of the story, I found myself just quite bored with his privilege-tinged, escapist descriptions of South America and his travels in general.
Other than that, I genuinely enjoyed this book overall and am strongly considering purchasing it just so I can go through and underline all of my favorite lines and passages.
Here are a few them (in chronological order):
“When they said, ‘I’m just scared that you’ll be unhappy,’ what I really felt they were saying was ‘I am scared that if you continue being yourself, we will make you unhappy.’ A sort of threat, veiled as kindness.”
“Sometimes, in the process, the more I talked, the more I’d end up making it all less and less convincing, even for myself. Words seemed to unravel the spell of life.”
“Marriage, it said, was ‘an expression of our fundamental humanity’. The pronoun ‘our’ did not include me. I am ashamed to say that I only understood the depth of my own collusion in this way of thinking when I saw it turn so starkly against me. Everything contrary to it was ‘disordered’, ‘unnatural’, outside the bounds of grace. I was sure, then, that if anything was intrinsically disordered, it was the Catholic Church. If anything was contrary to nature it was harnessing an idea of nature and weaponising it.”
“After he died, I thought of that often. The garden, the birds — that was his idea of heaven, a man who didn’t believe in God, didn’t know where he was going when he left. Really, that is the only heaven that makes sense to me, too… What was the garden, then, if not heaven, if not a place made up of everything that had been lost to us, if not an afterlife? After that, the whole world could be heaven to me. Still, it seems like the most simple, the most beautiful way I can think of looking at life. Everything, all of it, is mimicry.”
“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. Whose heaven was it anyway?
Content Warnings
Moderate: Suicidal thoughts and Mental illness
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
nmruss's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
4.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mental illness, Self harm, Suicide, and Suicide attempt
Moderate: Religious bigotry, Alcohol, and Homophobia
izzywoo's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicidal thoughts, Suicide attempt, Grief, and Mental illness
remimicha's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Panic attacks/disorders, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide attempt, Religious bigotry, Mental illness, Toxic relationship, Suicide, and Grief
Moderate: Death, Sexual content, Classism, Adult/minor relationship, Emotional abuse, Death of parent, Terminal illness, Religious bigotry, Homophobia, and Alcohol
katewhite77's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
slow-paced
5.0
This a beautiful and very brave memoir
You can certainly tell Seán Hewitt is a poet. The words drip off the page. One of the best books about the reality of living with, and caring for someone with depression can be. It also rendors perfectly what a debilitating emotion shame can be.
I definitely want to seek out someone Seán Hewitt's poetry now. I am not generally a re reader but I shall definitely be returning to this one as I think the more I read it the more I will get from it.
Can I also recommend reading and listening to this book at same time as the author reads it himself which makes it even more poignant.
You can certainly tell Seán Hewitt is a poet. The words drip off the page. One of the best books about the reality of living with, and caring for someone with depression can be. It also rendors perfectly what a debilitating emotion shame can be.
I definitely want to seek out someone Seán Hewitt's poetry now. I am not generally a re reader but I shall definitely be returning to this one as I think the more I read it the more I will get from it.
Can I also recommend reading and listening to this book at same time as the author reads it himself which makes it even more poignant.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Suicide attempt, Mental illness, and Sexual content