Reviews with content warning for Suicidal thoughts - All Down Darkness Wide

Reviews tagging 'Suicidal thoughts'

All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt

26 reviews

aidenmagro's review

challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.75

I bought this book from a market stall in a moment of feeling incredibly lost and looking for something that might show me the way (or at least, a way). I was greeted with long, detailed sentences describing the most haunting scenes in the most beautiful ways and knew I had made the right decision. A very vulnerable and honest recount of love, fear and discovery guided by the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Karin Boye and others.

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alliegentry's review

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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.

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marie33's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

3.75

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kvelpr's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad slow-paced

4.25

The writing is excellent; I think the writing would have been higher if I had found the book at a different time in my life…

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robbie_d94's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

4.5

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njstew's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad medium-paced

4.5

Beautiful and intricately human

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carrotsarenot's review

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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?

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