All Down Darkness Wide

Description

Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature • Named a Best Book of 2022 by Kirkus, Booklist, and Shelf Awareness • Named a Best Book of July by Buzzfeed • A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction 2022 Summer Read • Observer Book of the Week • Lammy Finalist

“The most beautiful prose I’ve read in years.”—Alexander Chee, The Atlantic • “Rapturous…Hewitt beautifully illuminates his own darknesses so that we might also see our own.”—Melissa Febos, The New York Times Book Review • “Exquisitely written.”—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine

When Seán Hewitt meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe mental illness, they soon come face-to-face with crisis.

All Down Darkness Wide is a perceptive and unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender and honest portrayal of what it’s like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one’s deep depression. As lives are made and unmade, this memoir asks what love can endure and what it cannot.

Delving into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures before him, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of answers. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to a sacred grotto in the Pyrenees, it is a journey of lonely discovery followed by the light of community. Haunted by the rites of Catholicism and spectres of shame, it is nevertheless marked by an insistent search for beauty.

Hewitt captures transcendent moments in nature with exquisite lyricism, honours the power of reciprocated desire and provides a master class in the incredible force of unsparing specificity. All Down Darkness Wide illuminates a path ahead for queer literature and for the literature of heartbreak, striking a piercing and resonant chord for all who trace Hewitt’s dauntless footsteps.“Rapturous . . . even his depictions of cruising have a holy aura. As a dedicated nonfiction writer, I sometimes meet poets’ memoirs with a caginess that is utterly disgraced by a book like this, whose structure is nearly as immaculate as its sentences . . . Writing is always an act of translation, and Hewitt beautifully illuminates his own darknesses so that we might also see our own.” —Melissa Febos, The New York Times Book Review

“Exquisitely written . . . In both the rhythms of his sentences and what he relays, Hewitt places himself firmly in an established British literary tradition . . . Though a study of despair, the memoir is not despairing . . . His call, framed by the poets to whom he feels so profoundly connected, as well as by his own family, is radical, a fervent appeal for presence and belonging.” —Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine

“Some of the most beautiful prose I’ve read in years . . . intensely original.” —Alexander Chee, The Atlantic

“Unique and singularly captivating . . . this memoir is gripping and deserves to be read by anyone looking for some hope in these especially dark times.” —David Vogel, Buzzfeed

“Vibrates off the page . . . It would be inaccurate to suggest the story is ultimately redemptive. As the memoir proceeds, however, it does so with a discernible sense of opening out, of Hewitt moving away from the shadows.” —Michael Donkor, The Guardian

“Luminous . . . This book will be passed hand to hand, as it should be . . . Hewitt’s journey into the underworld is, in the end, all about finding words, and the ones he has unearthed are sure to linger with readers.” —Tim Pfaff, Bay Area Reporter

“Extraordinary . . . Hewitt pulls the reader in, knows how to charm. He is, before and after everything else, a romantic . . . powerful and affecting.” —Kate Kellaway, The Guardian

“Captivating…the result of an energetic and sometimes restless mind at work structuring memory into art… sexy and deeply moving, our desires being made to mean something beyond our own bodies.”—Richard Scott Larson, Washington Square Review

“Makes you want to underline, again and again . . . an immense feat of both imagination and empathy.” —Luke Warde, Sunday Independent
 
“Poignant and painful, rigorous and sensual . . . Hewitt has forged a life-enhancing memoir . . . an outstanding chronicle of a gay poet’s journey of self-discovery.” —Michael Arditti, The Spectator

“Stunning . . . enrapturing in its beauty: a rare queer book where the trauma at its heart feels healing.” —Douglas Greenwood, i-D

“Excellent . . . There is such a casual beauty to his images and metaphors that this reads less like words on a page and closer to torrents of water washing over you . . . a robust and mellifluous text that feels joyous to read . . . A stunning meditation on love and heartbreak, this feels like an essential work of the new Irish queer canon.” —Barry Pierce, The Times (UK)
 
“The emergence of a major talent. . . stunning . . . his empathy, intelligence and mastery of language . . . adds something to the world and feels like a space will need to made on the Queer Classics shelf.” —Paul McVeigh, The Irish Independent
 
“A sensual history of love and loss, coming-of-age and lapsed Catholicism, and finding the language for the heaviest emotions that are shouldered in queer life . . .  in such achingly beautiful, resplendent writing on his darkest moments, we find hope.” —Anna Cafolla, The Face

“A beautiful, vulnerable account . . . a rich, moving memoir in which Hewitt reveals the loneliness of his early life, but also hope for his future yet to be written.” —Christiana Bishop, The New Stateman

“Searching . . . unforgettable . . . as lyrically written as any book of poetry.” —Rebecca Foster, Shelf Awareness

“Stunning . . . This memoir is a heartbreaking disquisition on ‘ghosts’ like Hopkins and on the unattainability of permanence, and it features one beautiful scene after another . . . A profoundly moving meditation on queer identity, mental illness, and the fragility of life.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“[A] remarkable book, haunting . . . extraordinary and simply unforgettable.” —Booklist (starred review)

“This book bears reading twice it is so beautiful. Readers seeking an elegant, profound memoir will find none better than this. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“A raw and hypnotic retelling reminiscent of Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness . . . a moving story of salvation . . . an exquisite vision of queer heartbreak and liberation.” —Publishers Weekly

“Seán Hewitt’s book is a beautiful, complex, and textured meditation on love, on growing up gay, on becoming a poet and on inhabiting Northern landscapes in winter. His account of falling in love and being in love is honest and vivid, doing justice to dark experience, offering the most private moments a sort of glow. I was engrossed, hardly looking up as I read. I woke in the morning fully enclosed by it, as though I had been dreaming it.” —Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician

“A wondrous act of recollection: flickering yet sonorous, elemental, humid, full of ache, flecked with ironic comedy. Hewitt makes shimmering magic from shame and shyness, through his own whispered disclosures as well as the echoes of other authors. This book arrives as if it was there all along, foxed and dog-eared from the first page.” —Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar

“Seán Hewitt’s memoir is extraordinarily beautiful (I mean that adverb: it is extra-ordinary) and moving and humane; it is the best new work of nonfiction I’ve read in years.” —Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent

“The book in your hands is a precious, living thing, each page alive with ache and with love, with truth and with tenderness. To read Seán Hewitt is to experience the rare jolt of encountering a writer whose work will continue to be treasured long after our lifetimes. A wonder.” —Doireann Ní Ghríofa, author of A Ghost in the Throat

“All Down Darkness Wide is a searing and sublime account of the scars left by intolerance and how they shape a self. Hewitt’s gorgeous prose gleams like a dayspring in the dimness, his story lingering long after the book is closed.” —Melissa Harrison, author of All Among the Barley
 
“All Down Darkness Wide lures you in with the beauty of its prose, the poetic images that linger hauntingly in the mind for long afterwards. Difficult stories of mental illness, repression, and self-denial are transfigured into something defiant and life-affirming. I loved the complexity of it, the way he subtly reveals how our fragile identities are formed (and de-formed) by the forces that surround us.” —Charlie Gilmour, author of Featherhood

“Gorgeous and moving prose that excavates the deep complexities of grief, shame and love with a tenderness and lightness of touch that makes the words sing.” —Andrew McMillan, author of Physical
 
“It’s impossible not to be intensely moved by this book, written with a poet’s eye for detail: line after line that grips head and heart. You are truly there with Seán Hewitt in the darkness and the light. His memoir of queer discovery, loves found and lost, the past that we carry with us, and ultimately of becoming, feels like a future classic.” —Niven Govinden, author of Diary of a Film

“Luminous and utterly original, a book with its own darkly beautiful gravity. I can’t think of anything I have read like it—in terms of style and sensibility, and emotional daring.” —Niamh Campbell, author of This HappySeán Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of J. M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism and the poetry collection Tongues of Fire, which was awarded the Laurel Prize and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize and a Dalkey Literary Award. He was awarded the 2022 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature is the recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award, the Resurgence Prize and an Eric Gregory Award. Hewitt is a book critic for the Irish Times and teaches modern British and Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin.Link to designed Book Club Kit: https://randomhouse.box.com/s/nh8rhjgnnejnrba7bksjj383twb47tvy

The questions, discussion topics, and other material that follow are intended to enhance your group’s conversation of Seán Hewitt’s debut memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, a luminous coming-of-age story, and a heartbreaking meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds.

1. The book begins in a cemetery, a setting that raises questions about things that are hidden and forgotten. What do you see as the difference between those two adjectives in the context of the memoir?

2. As a gay man born in 1990, Hewitt grows up in a period of major cultural shifts in the queer experience. How is this changing sociopolitical reality manifested in his life specifically?

3. How did the nonlinear, flashback sections of the prose inform your reading of the more recent events of the narrative?

4. What unites and what distinguishes the figures who haunt the book—namely Jack, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Karin Boye, Bernadette Soubirous, and even the Virgin Mary? When Hewitt writes “here was this procession of men, walking beside me, people I knew and loved being added to it, and, one by one, their lights were being put out. In their midst, I felt my own light flickering, too” (31). What tethers his experience to theirs, and what sets his apart?

5. All Down Darkness Wide describes furtive sex, playful sex, terrifying sex, sex that communicates deep love, and sex that’s diven by repression and insecurity. For both Hewitt and his partners, what does sex bring to bear toward our understanding of their characters?

6. How does Elias’s depression change him? How does it change Hewitt? The memoir is written so that the reader recognizes those changes slightly ahead of the narrator—as a reader, what was the impact of this effect for you?

7. Both Hewitt and Elias have parents who are loving and caring, yet part of growing up is recognizing the limits of what our mothers and fathers can do to protect us and heal us. How do Hewitt and Elias experience and process this shift?

8. What does Hewitt find within the Catholic Church that resonates with his sense of self, and how does he ultimately come to turn away from that institution?

9. Together, Hewitt and Elias begin a translation practice in which “each poem was like an icon, something we spoke through, something that seemed to crystalize our broken thoughts into forms we could both understand” (160). Why do we sometimes have to turn to the words of others in order to articulate the truest versions of our own thoughts and feelings?

10. Can an author be the ultimate authority on their own life? When Hewitt writes that “lying is something I had become good at with practice,” (184) does the sentiment raise any questions for you about this text?I

The Oratory of St James’s Cemetery in Liverpool has no windows along the whole length of its outer walls. Only a long rectangular skylight, its leaded panes half-mossed over, lets the winter sun reach down and touch the white marble statues staring blankly inside. A mortuary chapel, but long closed up, its coffered ceiling and tall, carved columns are mostly in shadow. Years ago, as the great homes of the city were pulled down stone by stone, the monuments of proud families (monuments of terracotta and marble and bronze) were hoisted here and locked away, and so the wealth of the city – wrenched from far-off lands and furnished from blood – was hidden, and so forgotten.

And as the years went by, other things were hidden, too. Some (like the terraced slums of the poor and their washhouses) were razed, others (the orphanages and workhouses, the asylums and homes for the destitute) were emptied one by one, turned by sharp-suited businessmen into flats or bars or restaurants, where the names of the dead, engraved in plaques on newly pointed walls, were the climbing holds of a city once again dragging itself up out of its own grave. And so the churches and crypts were closed, and the docks shut down, and the shackles shipped and left on other shores, and the subterranean tunnels and the catacombs were filled in with stones, and the quarry was planted with oaks and with sycamores and with the bodies of the dead. And it was in this way that the ghosts of the city were parcelled off, ushered from the streets into derelict buildings, made to stand in exhibition cases, hurried into the pages of books and diaries, and folded away. For, after all, ghosts can only live in the darkness; and once the dark places are closed up, their cast-iron locks bolted fast, it is easy for those who do not live with them to pretend that ghosts do not exist at all.

Past midnight, one mid-January, standing in the church gardens, I felt the wind blow up from the River Mersey, weighted with Atlantic salt. It blustered up to the city, battering the red bricks of the warehouses on the dock, rattling the barred doors of the pump-house and the locks of the customs house. I heard it rush south-east between the empty units along St James’s Street, clapping the tattered flags of the old sailors’ church, and spinning frantically in the bell-turret of St Vincent’s. It rushed up the steep junction of Parliament Street, past the new-builds, over the waiting cars at the traffic lights, and there scurried down the tree-tunnelled sandstone path into the cathedral cemetery, resting, finally, in a swirl of leaves and a ripple of the spring water by the catacombs, unseen by anyone except a carved angel weeping over a nineteenth-century grave, and the lone figure of a man – me – kneeling and drinking from the water flowing in runnels down the old cemetery wall.

I had come here to meet someone – a man I didn’t know, but who was somehow like myself. Above the cemetery gardens the terrifying neo-gothic cathedral loomed across the sky, its stained glass half-aglow even at night. I could almost feel the weight of its shadow, like a body bearing down on mine. To venture into the graveyard, you have first to walk through a tunnel of hollowed rock, its walls lined with old grave-slabs and dripping with dank water filtered through the paving stones and tree roots overhead. And at the end of this, where hardly any light can be found after sundown, a little path winds fearlessly onwards between the holly and the yews and the leaning granite obelisks.

Nearly a century has passed since the last body was interred here, and the lichen has spread over the tombs and into the once-neat etchings of names and dates and Latin mottos and platitudes both sentimental and heartfelt. Lichen over the staunch Victorian formalities of lives lived in stoicism and resignation, and into the carefully chosen testaments to numberless tragedies and joys given from mother to child, from husband to wife, from friend to friend and from lover to dearly missed lover. Years ago, a hearse tunnel, now capped with brick, brought carriages, one by one, down from the Georgian grandeur of Rodney Street into the cemetery, and now perhaps no one is old enough to remember these dead.

At the centre of the cemetery, flowing down into a square pool between the laid-out gravestones, a little spring uncovered in the eighteenth century runs on, unperturbed, trickling over the luminous green growths of liverwort and algae on the bricked-up far wall of the plot. And on this January night, when the only living inhabitant of the graveyard is a single man drinking from the spring, anyone might come down and walk under the silvered boughs, hearing that gentle babbling stream, and imagine all the souls here, cooped up in the soil, passing from root to root, moving slowly in the underworld of the earth. At the heart of it all is water – its slow leak along the walls, its passage through all the plants and mosses and trees, its movement through the apertures of the shale embankments, its sheening under the moon on the marble of a family vault. Laden with iron, the water is sharp and metallic and tastes faintly of blood. Some in the city believe in its healing powers, and follow the words of the inscription carved above the spring, which speaks, in the voice of water, of the endless cycle of giving:

Christian reader view in me

An emblem of true charity,

Who freely what I have bestow

Though neither heard nor seen to flow.

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. And so perhaps it was fitting that I came here that evening, unsure of where else to go, feeling lonely and shut out from the daylight world, the downward paths from Princes Park leading me on into this navel of the city. An unsettling place to be after dark, not so much for any fear of the dead, but of the living: the men I had seen huddling around a lighter, their square of tinfoil glinting; the occasional hunched figure wandering; a group of drunks walking the pavement of Hope Street, faces hot with wine. It would be tempting to say that it was a sense of communion that drew me into the gardens, a sense that down here, with the dead, was where I belonged – hollowed out, tired, looking for something in this wooded grove squat amongst the townhouses and the busy roads – but other urges drove me, too, on to the little spring, like a pilgrim to the underworld, my phone’s light held up to the darkness, my golden bough.

I met the man by the Huskisson monument. Unsure at first (who can tell if the lone man in the cemetery is the man you’re looking for, or the man you don’t want to find?), I leant against the bare wall of the tomb and feigned nonchalance, scuffing my heels into the mud. It was only two weeks since I had taken my boyfriend Elias to the airport for the last time. I had lived with him in Sweden, and he had fallen into a deep depression, one that went unchecked for too long. That depression dragged me in, too, proliferated into my life; and here I was, still in the middle of it, so numbed I was barely aware of its presence. After nearly five years, struggling through, we finally admitted that what we had could not be fixed. Too much damage had been done between us. We had been wrecked. It was as though a force had come through the world, alighted on us, and conducted its strike to the ground. Saying goodbye, a fortnight ago, he barely cried as we hugged in the car park, but I was beside myself. I watched him walk off, trailing his suitcase, as the doors of the terminal opened then closed around him. Afterwards, I went to the woods just behind the airport and walked and walked, sitting by the streams and the waterfalls, lifting my head occasionally to say a pained ‘Good morning’ to the passing walkers, taking the wet bodies of their dogs between my palms and stroking them as the tears streamed down my face. I remember two children running madly among the old oaks, putting their heads into the hollows of the trunks and shouting ‘Hello!’ ‘Hello!’ ‘Hello!’ from the depths of their lungs, as though the god of the tree might wake up and answer them. Here, perhaps, I was doing the same thing: in a cemetery at night, meeting a man I didn’t know. Shouting into the hollow trunk of the world and hoping to see a face appear, to feel its touch, to hear its deep, sonorous reply.

The man was tall, his body taut beneath his winter coat and jeans. A kickboxing teacher, it turned out. Later, he would text me, asking if my name was Ryan. He had mistaken (whether accidentally or wilfully, I can’t tell) my face in the dark for that of one of his students. I suppose we are all, at some point, taking the face of some ideal lover into our mind and placing it like a mask on to the person in front of us. Maybe I was mistaking him, too, for another boy I once knew. Maybe this was my way of continuing his life, seeing him age into manhood, seeing him inhabit years he never would. If I closed my eyes, perhaps it was Jack I was with, or Elias, or another boy, or all of them merged into a new form.

After some quiet introductions, he nodded towards a thicket of trees and started walking, keeping his distance. I heard the clicking of his lighter as he lit a cigarette, watched him take a deep, slow drag and then exhale the blue smoke into the night-blue air. Then, as I reached him, fumbling: the belt unbuckled, the vertical sound of the zipper. All the time that I was on my knees, I could hear the trembling chain of the spring water clinking and splashing over the far stones. When he finished, I took him all the way into my mouth and held him there as I felt him weaken, then pull back.

Afterwards, I walked to the spring and cupped the ice-cold water into my palm, watched its bright dancing for a second and then lifted it to rinse my mouth. I could still taste him there and couldn’t face the long walk home without this little ablution, cleansing myself back into sanctity. As I walked away, up to the Parliament Street gate, I cast my head down, determined to muster some deep reserve of what I thought of as masculine courage. I wanted so much to be the man who could walk in these places at night, to be the man who would not turn his head to check if, in the black spaces of the cemetery, there wasn’t a lone figure following, hiding behind the headstones, who might (out of his own fear) stop me from leaving.

A week later I sat up in bed and felt my neck sore and swollen, my glands puffed up and beating. The sun touched each bead of water on my single-paned window, glittering them. I could almost feel the virus pricking and spreading in my body. I panicked. I sweated cold and then hot. My mind whirred and whirred madly over statistics and history, ancestry, all those men lining the corridors of wards, all those bleeping machines and frail, stick-thin corpses. Though I did not know them, their ghosts haunt me. I am, somehow, their descendant: I arrived into a world full of ghosts, and owed a part of myself to each of them. At the clinic, as the nurse took a vial of blood from my arm and commented on the raised width of my vein, she noted down my history, and I heard their voices, and felt a dull weight come over me that wouldn’t lift for a week.

In the end it was a false alarm. All clear. Of course it was. I was anxious, full of shame, always expecting the worst, always expecting to be put in line by some sort of cosmic justice. I still saw my body as a thing that might register every misdemeanour and then punish me for them. But it was strange how, in that strip-lit hospital room, my history was not mine at all. Like a river, spreading through its bends and tributaries, it moved through even the most secret parts of my body. It included every encounter, every man, and from there all of their men, all of their encounters, spreading outwards and outwards over the city, then the country, then continents, linking thousands of us together by what we had given to each other, and what we had taken. That night in the cemetery was just one node in a huge, sprawling network. History seeping from one man into the warm body of another, then being carried off into the daily life of the world, barely noticed.

*

It was at school, aged seventeen, that I first became aware of my blood as somehow historical, extending back before I was born. Though I had known it in different ways as a child, I was carrying the weight of the past in my veins. Every day, without thought, my heart pumped it around my body – it seemed natural, unconscious, free from morality. It was only later that I found out that my blood could be a clamp, could be tightened to hold me in place. My high school sat on the edge of a wealthy village by a post-industrial town in the north-west of England. Partly because of its proximity to the town, it was the sort of place where purity (of class, of race, of family) was prized, but left largely unspoken. The village – with its quaint sandstone buildings and bridges, its pubs, its odd festivals, its pretty canal dotted lazily with painted narrowboats – was exclusive even to those who schooled there. Catching the bus into school each morning was enough to mark you as an outsider, hailing from some close but far-off place where the house prices were lower, the vowels slightly more lengthened. Wearing the wrong shoes, the cheap blazer, the hand-me-down sports gear – anything was enough to elicit a look or a comment.

Being who I was, I had learnt from a young age the stealth tactics of conformity: how to hide a lisp, how to correct a too-expressive walk, how to pitch my voice lower, which I practised in my bedroom for many weeks during puberty. But it wasn’t until I was seventeen that I was faced, consciously, with a non-conformity I couldn’t finesse my way out of. I saw then, more clearly than before, the ways in which the world had placed me – even before I knew it –into innate opposition. One afternoon, the blood-donationvans rolled up into the school car park, and suddenly the lunchtime common room was full of nurses and camp beds and middle-class moral fervour. A vague rumour went around the school – a sense of excitement and obligation, a sixth-form rite of passage into adulthood taking place in the oddly transfigured hall. Known as the ‘hexagon’ for its six sided structure, the common room was brightly lit, blue,and full of fold-down furniture and tables stacked against the walls. In one corner, there was a small hatch where canteen staff would sell cakes and pastries to teenagers who seemed hardly ever to gain weight. But now, booths had been set up using felt-board dividers, and in each sat a nurse, with a clipboard on her lap and an empty chair in front of her. One by one, we moved from the queue and took our seat in front of whichever nurse was free, and on doing so we were welcomed kindly, and handed a form to fill out. It was a good thing we were doing, it was selfless and right, and they reminded us of that often. On the form there was a row of tiny boxes, and next to each box was a question. As usual, I went down the list, cavalierly ticking ‘no’. No, I do not have HIV. No, I have never been given money for sex. No, I have never injected drugs. And then a pause, a sudden flush of the cheeks. I felt my ears burn red and looked up, wondering if the nurse had noticed my hesitation. ‘In the last twelve months,’ the form asked, ‘have you had oral or anal sex with a man, with or without a condom?’ I didn’t know what to do. Tell the truth, tick ‘yes’ and have to leave, have to explain to her and to everyone why I couldn’t donate (sixteen, fumbling of zips in the back row of the cinema, something secret and forbidden); or lie, preserve myself as respectable, virginal; a queer, yes, but not the sort of queer who would dream of doing what half the other students did every weekend on the faded couches at the back of the Rugby Club discos. I had changed my accent, studied hard, cultivated myself into inviolability. And so, for everything I had worked for, for the safety of my one-man kingdom, I scratched a quick pencil line through the box that said ‘no’, and handed the clipboard back to the nurse.

After she pricked my finger and the bright droplet of blood floated in the vial she was holding, she prepared the soft skin of my inner arm, lay me down on to one of the beds and took out her needle. I felt a flutter in my vein, as though a butterfly were trapped inside. ‘Sorry – I caught the valve,’ the nurse said, smiling apologetically as I winced. She slid the needle backwards slightly, then pushed it inside again. Assured that my heart would pump out a pint of blood in a short time, the nurse left me lying there and went back to her seat and to the next teenager in line. As I looked up, a dozen of my schoolfriends were lying in a circle of beds, each with a silver needle tucked into their arm, each unconsciously pumping their blood into a clear pint bag, which was held at the side of the bed and rocked rhythmically to keep the blood from clotting or congealing. All around me, as Elvis Presley’s ‘Good Luck Charm’ played from a portable analogue radio, my classmates were lying in silence, staring up at the ceiling tiles, the scarlet pouches of blood moving in iambs, the motion of their hearts externalised and made visible. I watched as each rocked back and forth. It was as though the room was suddenly underwater – the air limpid, strangely beautiful and unnerving. Each thing had a heavy motion; and each person was oddly quiet, slowed by this pre-natal rhythm, the systole and diastole of their own body pulsing out their blood.

Everything felt uncanny – spiritual, almost, and distant. Every so often the nurses in their white would move around us, our eyes following them curiously until they walked out of view. There, lying down one body in this circle of bodies, I felt the sense feigned equality drawing out of my veins. The lie I had gain entrance into this clique of righteousness gave Though it seemed morally sound to begin with (a to subvert the rules set against me; a lie that might, all, save a life), suddenly, I would rather someone died than that they have my blood under such conditions. Now, nothing was sacred. Not even these nurses these smiling women; mothers and aunts and friends. of a sudden they were hostile, everything was hostile. Gradually, all these emblems of safety, of comfort, were inverted. My blood was full of ghosts and I could heart hem chanting in the rhythms of the room. Eventually, the nurse came over and removed the needle from my arm and put a plaster over the small wound. When I stood up, my vision clouded over with white shapes and bright, expanding circles. I fell to the floor with a smack and woke up in another world.US

Additional information

Weight	12.6 oz
Dimensions	0.8400 × 5.7100 × 8.5300 in
Imprint	Penguin Press
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780593300084
ISBN-10	0593300084
Author	Seán Hewitt
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	BIO031000, FAM029000
Subjects	biographies of famous people, autobiography, pride month, biographies, motivational books, essays, memoirs, lgbt books, relationship books, autobiographies, couple, couple gifts, Trust, love book, lgbtq books, autobiography books, couples gifts, love books, memoir books, biographies and memoirs, depression books, lgbt memoir, irish books, depression, BIO031000, queer, LGBTQ, self help, FAM029000, relationship, relationships, family, biography, Memoir, lesbian, parenting, romance, love, grief, coming of age, lgbt, pride, gay, long distance, couples, Irish