... a rapturous account of his years with a boyfriend who suffered from suicidal depression ... Woven into this portrait of depression’s maelstrom is the author’s own queer coming-of-age. Of his abandoned Catholicism, Hewitt confesses that 'the shape of myself was molded by it, the routines of my body colored by its sounds and movements, the imagery of my mind rinsed with it,' and to our benefit; 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. Near the book’s end, the lovers collaborate on a poetic translation and work to 'piece together a voice in the space between us.' Writing is always an act of translation, and Hewitt beautifully illuminates his own darknesses so that we might also see our own.
The contradictions of Seán Hewitt’s memoir are no less intense, but less readily apparent...The author of a 2020 poetry collection, Tongues of Fire, and of an academic study of the Irish playwright J. M. Synge, Hewitt would not seem at first glance to be someone in peril...But his thoughtful and often exquisitely written memoir is both a gay coming-of-age and an exploration of the mental health crises affecting the LGBTQ community...More specifically, it is the story of his long-term partner Elias’s suicidal depression, of the toll this illness took on Hewitt, and of the revelations that it spurred...The dramas in this book, like the sentences, are less pyrotechnic than those of Asturias or Kochai, but they lack neither energy nor significance...The memoir at its core is about Hewitt’s relationship with Elias, starting with their meeting in Colombia, where both men are traveling alone...Elias is Swedish, and once Hewitt returns to the United Kingdom, their relationship seems destined to be long-distance, until they move in together: first in Liverpool, where Hewitt pursues a graduate degree, and subsequently in Gothenburg...Though a study of despair, the memoir is not despairing: through their poetry, Hopkins and Boye offer inspiration to Hewitt, also a poet...Considering queer lives, 'both of them hoped—one with certainty, one with longing—that there would be a place for those people, a friend to watch them, a room with their name above the lintel.'
... some of the most beautiful prose I’ve read in years... This is not a break-up memoir, however...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' ... Hewitt closes here, trying to imagine how he might invite this original self back into his life. He doesn’t say if he succeeds, but perhaps that will be this memoir’s sequel. It’s the one I’ll hope for, at least.
