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Magill’s Literary Annual 2023

All Down Darkness Wide

by Melynda Fuller

Author: Seán Hewitt (b. 1990)

Publisher: Penguin Press (New York). 240 pp.

Type of work: Memoir

Time: Late 2000s–present day

Locales: England, Sweden, Colombia, Peru, Brazil

Seán Hewitt’s memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, recounts the author’s experience in a relationship turned upside down by a period of suicidal depression. Told through flashbacks to this period in his life, Hewitt weaves a story that attempts to account for the harm that can be done when one is forced to hide the most important parts of oneself, including mental illness and sexual identity.

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Courtesy Penguin Publishing Group

Principal personages

Seán, an Irish-English poet

Elias, his partner, a Swedish man who suffers a mental breakdown

Jack, his college love interest who appears in flashbacks throughout the memoir

All Down Darkness Wide (2022), the first memoir from Irish-English writer Seán Hewitt is an exploration of belonging in a world where the status quo is working against you, learning to let yourself be seen after years of hiding, and the mental toll those practices wreak on a human body and mind. Often the purpose of memoir is to gather meaning from the disparate parts of one’s life, and All Down Darkness Wide is no different. As Hewitt faces life following his breakup with long-time partner Elias, an outgoing Swedish man he meets in South America while traveling, he examines the ways in which he is both fully in the world and not. Taking a path of reflection following the discovery of an obituary of a one-time college love interest, Jack, Hewitt’s emotional journey through his experiences in loneliness, coming out as a gay man, and attempting to fit into a society that is at once accepting and filled with ridicule and rejection culminates in a vivid and lyrical portrait of one man’s experience made universal through a depth of emotion and language. Hewitt, who is also an accomplished poet, uses the form frequently throughout All Down Darkness Wide’s pages to get closer to the base of human desire and shame.

The memoir begins as Hewitt is visiting the Oratory of St. James’s Cemetery in Liverpool, England, at night, preparing to meet a man for an intimate encounter. It is here that Hewitt sets the tone of the book, taking the reader in with his lush language and descriptions of the cemetery and its environs, and into his own religious haunting. Meditating on a spring that runs by the church that many in the city believe to hold healing powers, Hewitt writes, “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.” This meditation on blood continues as Hewitt begins to open up about his past, taking the reader into his early days as a closeted and then newly out gay man. He remembers a moment at school, for example, when the students were implored to donate blood. Hewitt lies about his sexual history so as not to reveal his sexual orientation.

The reader is also introduced to Jack in this first of seven sections. Jack, the reader learns, was an exciting, attractive PhD student at Cambridge University while Hewitt was also attending as an undergraduate. In the present day, Hewitt comes across Jack’s obituary, found randomly in a local paper. Though the cause of death is not provided, Hewitt speculates that it might be suicide, citing the pressures faced by most gay men he knows to live in the world and find happiness.

Seán Hewitt

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Courtesy Penguin Publishing Group

As the book progresses, Hewitt makes his way through undergraduate and graduate school. After completing his first advanced degree and unsure of what he should do next, Hewitt saves enough money working at a job in Liverpool to travel abroad for several months. He lands in Colombia and exploring other parts of South America from there. On one of his final days in Colombia, Hewitt spies Elias in the hostel dorm, closing the blinds as the hot rays of the day’s sun come in through the windows. A vivid portrait of the pair’s travels through Brazil and Peru follows as Hewitt shows how he and Elias fell in love. Hewitt eventually moves to Gothenburg, Sweden, to live with Elias. Once in Sweden, however, Elias begins to show signs of mental illness, soon having a complete breakdown in which he nearly commits suicide and must be hospitalized. Much of the remainder of the book is a recollection of the difficulties of this experience and a journey through Hewitt’s past, as he examines the role religion played in his life, in addition to the impact of class and culture.

Being a poet, Hewitt’s connection to language is what truly makes All Down Darkness Wide a special book. The story is a stirring one, of course, but it is Hewitt’s gifts with connection and lyricism that stand out. Following his early meditation on the healing waters of the spring in the St. James’s Cemetery, he later recalls trips to Lourdes with his Catholic youth group, where the teens would be matched up with pilgrims who had come to take part in the healing waters. On one occasion, Hewitt decides to dip into the waters himself, describing a moment of seeing a small statue of Our Lady of Lourdes—the apparition said to have appeared to St. Bernadette in the town of Lourdes—as he comes up from his dunk in the baptismal waters. The pilgrims come with buckets to fill from the spring and souvenir plastic bottles shaped like the Virgin Mary are for sale to take some of the healing waters home. One of Hewitt’s friends whose mother is sick with cancer carts gallons of the water home so that she can bathe in it. Hewitt is clear with the reader that he himself is not a believer and that his involvement with Catholicism was more cultural than anything; however, when he ties these religious experiences to those of nineteenth-century English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, a new depth emerges. Hewitt has a deep admiration for Hopkins, who serves as a kind of spiritual soulmate for the author and was the subject of Hewitt’s dissertation in university. Further, the memoir’s title, All Down Darkness Wide, comes from one of Hopkins’ poems, “The Lantern out of Doors” (1878). Like Hopkins, Hewitt confesses at times that he found a false safety within the church, where he could hide from who he knew himself to be and find acceptance just by following the rules. Hopkins, as some scholars have suggested, likewise used the Catholic church to hide from his sexuality and to try to control the shame he felt about his own body. But like Elias, Hopkins, too, fell into a deep depression and melancholy.

Hewitt’s portrayal of his time spent helping Elias after his breakdown can be repetitive, but that repetition is what takes the reader deeper into their solitude and the very difficult nature of their relationship. As Elias struggles to recover from his suicidal feelings, he and Hewitt continue to live together in Sweden, sharing a studio just big enough for their bed, a table, and a chair. Hewitt feels real terror every time he must leave Elias, worried that the man he loves will once again attempt suicide and this time succeed. The description of those days—with Hewitt often escaping to drink outdoors while Elias is sleeping—echoes the darkness of the Swedish winter when not much light fills their days. Soon, the reader realizes, Hewitt is trapped in a new kind of secrecy, one where no one can know about Elias’s mental breakdown (Elias is very ashamed and secretive about what has happened to him). As such, Hewitt is once again trapped in a lie with those he loves, much like he was before coming out.

All Down Darkness Wide received universal positive reception among critics. Many focused on Hewitt’s ability to convey the emotions and challenges of mental health struggles. For the New York Times, fellow memoirist Melissa Febos wrote, “The book articulates the ‘endless, enduring present’ of being a primary caretaker to someone who is both ‘the man I loved and the person who wanted to kill the man I loved.’” For the Guardian, Kate Kellaway explained, “All Down Darkness Wide is not about answers. It does not offer glib consolations and is all the more powerful and affecting for that. It is about coming out in the widest sense—and that includes the outing of depression.” Critics likewise praised Hewitt’s use of poetic language. Writer Alexander Chee in the Atlantic marked Hewitt’s writing as “some of the most beautiful prose I’ve read in years.” He continued, “This intensely original memoir’s real subject is what appears to Hewitt, in the aftermath of these relationships, as a thread that connects these men to each other, and to himself—a sort of curse, a brokenness in them, in us.” The memoir also received starred reviews in Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly.

Author Biography

Seán Hewitt is the author of the poetry collection Tongues of Fire (2020) and the nonfiction book J. M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism (2021) about the Irish playwright. His first memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, won the 2022 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. A book critic for the Irish Times, Hewitt also teaches modern British and Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin.

Review Sources

1 

Review of All Down Darkness Wide, by Seán Hewitt. Kirkus Reviews, 26 Apr. 2022, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/sean-hewitt/all-down-darkness-wide/. Accessed 18 Nov. 2022.

2 

Review of All Down Darkness Wide, by Seán Hewitt. Publishers Weekly, 11 Mar. 2022, www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-593-30008-4. Accessed 18 Nov. 2022.

3 

Chee, Alexander. “The Toll of Hiding One’s True Self.” Review of All Down Darkness Wide, by Seán Hewitt. The Atlantic, 4 Oct. 2022, www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/10/sean-hewitt-all-down-darkness-wide-memoir-book-review/671638/. Accessed 18 Nov. 2022.

4 

Febos, Melissa. “Memoir Writing Is Always an Act of Translation.” Review of All Down Darkness Wide, by Seán Hewitt, et al. The New York Times, 28 July 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/books/review/a-hard-place-to-leave-marcia-desanctis-into-the-inferno-stuart-palley-crying-in-the-bathroom-erika-l-sanchez-all-down-darkness.html. Accessed 18 Nov. 2022.

5 

Kellaway, Kate. “All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt—A Remarkable Memoir of Love and Sorrow in Sweden.” Review of All Down Darkness Wide, by Seán Hewitt. The Guardian, 10 July 2022, www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jul/10/all-down-darkness-wide-by-sean-hewitt-review-a-remarkable-memoir-of-love-and-sorrow-in-sweden. Accessed 18 Nov. 2022.

6 

Pierce, Barry. “All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt Review—Anatomy of Heartbreak.” Review of All Down Darkness Wide, by Seán Hewitt. The Sunday Times, 30 June 2022, www.thetimes.co.uk/article/all-down-darkness-wide-by-sean-hewitt-review-s256ff6zp. Accessed 18 Nov. 2022.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Fuller, Melynda. "All Down Darkness Wide." Magill’s Literary Annual 2023, edited by Jennifer Sawtelle, Salem Press, 2023. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=MLA23_0007.
APA 7th
Fuller, M. (2023). All Down Darkness Wide. In J. Sawtelle (Ed.), Magill’s Literary Annual 2023. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Fuller, Melynda. "All Down Darkness Wide." Edited by Jennifer Sawtelle. Magill’s Literary Annual 2023. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2023. Accessed December 08, 2025. online.salempress.com.