A review by hotboychef
All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt

4.5

This memoir’s similarity to Norwegian Wood is unnerving. Hewitt narrates his life via key relationships, as does Dream Count and Norwegian Wood. Hewitt’s relationships extend beyond people: they span between Elias and queerness, Catholicism, and poetry, with Hopkins as the linking figure who embodies them all. 

Hewitt seems to struggle with the link between himself and Hopkins. On an occasion while reading, he comments that Hopkins’s poems encourage him to stop reading about the world and to start living it: ‘It was as though Hopkins were there, shouting at me for being inside, for doing anything so dull as reading a book’. It is an amusing contradiction, and a tension that extends throughout the book. Elias embodies life, and then death, whereas Hewitt sees himself entrapped in the limits of language. 

Hopkins serves as reminder that art is not a closed circuit but based on reality. And that is why this memoir is so powerful, because the pain of its truth is so evident and not obscured by the artifice of fiction.

Though unbearably sad and often hard to read, reading this memoir, i felt great privilege to be so close the heart of someone so sensitive and intelligent.