Seán Hewitt

'A remarkable memoir of love and sorrow' Observer A luminous and haunting memoir from the prize-winning poet - a story of love, heartbreak and coming of age, and a fearless exploration of queer identity and trauma. When Seán meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe depression, the couple comes face-to-face with crisis. Wrestling with this, Seán Hewitt delves deep into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures and poets before him. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to the pine forests of Gothenburg, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of solace and hope. All Down Darkness Wide is an unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender portrayal of what it's like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one's suffering. By turns devastating and soaring, it is a mesmerising story of heartache and renewal, and a work of rare and transcendent beauty. 'A stunning meditation on love and heartbreak, this feels like an essential work of the new Irish queer canon' Sunday Times

A Memoir

All Down Darkness Wide

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He always stood with a straight back, seemed poised and aware of his own movements, but not in a repressed or awkward way. It was as though he had perfected the art of himself. He was careful and attentive to what his body might do for him.

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 a kindness. Perhaps they told themselves that they wanted to protect me from being unhappy. After all, how hard is it to keep a secret, if the prize for keeping it is a life of happiness? But I'm sure they also wanted to protect themselves from their association with me, and the violence that might come with it. They did not want me to be happy by making happiness possible, but by asking me to live in a world which they knew was set against me. Their critique was of me, not of themselves. They said, 'I am scared you will be unhappy.' They meant, 'It is better to be on the right-hand side of the devil than in his path. And so there was an admis-sion, something in them that knew they were complicit.

It is hard to account for the trauma of a thing that didnt happen, hard to accommodate a fear based in an almost-event, a thing that might have occurred, but didn't. …Still, years later, it is the music of what almost happened that haunts me most, and will not leave my mind.

Immediately, I answered yes. And it was true - I was happy, for the most part, very happy. But that happiness was never absolute, because I knew it would be finite. I knew, from the earliest age I can remember, that one day I would have to tell my parents and my friends a secret about myself, a secret I could not escape, and they would leave me, or I would have to leave them, and then my happiness would be over.

I was saying goodbye to the self I had prayed for, to this ruinous safety I had made for myself to inhabit.

As I listened, I felt a deep schism opening between myself and the people and institutions I had loved. But as the rift widened over time, I began to feel more free. The ties between myself and my world, the ones that had held me down, were being cut. My body and my queerness and my life became inseparable. Through that splitting away, I felt myself becoming irrevocably and radically whole.

Integration, I realised, had split me. Now, finally detached, I felt alive, I felt free. I had looked into the mirror of my country and had seen my own irreconcilable difference.

The world I had defended - and into which I had intertwined myself - did not love me. I knew that now. Still, they had something I wanted: they had stolen my God from me.

That idea of God, of a world that, if touched rightly, might

'give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him', was something I couldn't let go of. I would steal my God back. I would run with him through the burning streets.

I never returned to church, but I found that it wasn't so easy to separate myself. I had become myself while wearing that armour - the shape of myself was moulded by it, the routines of my body coloured by its sounds and movement, the imagery of my mind rinsed with it. The Church, and all those other accoutrements, ran through me like water flowing through a sediment. I brought Hopkins with me out of the wreckage. I brought a changed image of God with me. When I swam and lifted myself out on to the shore, I felt the light of rebirth. When I saw the million forms of the earth playing in the sun, I thought of my old God, disembodied, and set free.

It was as though I had met a different version of myself. I felt sad, then comforted. There, walking off into the night, turning the key in his car and driving away, was a man I had escaped from being. But there was also a man who had not escaped.

Not for the first time, I had to displace myself from myself. Not for the frst time, I found myself caught inside a secret.

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