I had a happy family and a happy childhood. As a child, I nearly wore out my CD of The Verve’s Urban Hymns, sitting on my bedroom floor, pressing the rewind button on my portable stereo to hear Richard Ashcroft singing, again and again, that he’s “like a cat in a bag, waiting to drown.” By pulling back the curtain on private moments of anguish, fear, and shame, Hewitt lets the light in-welcoming a found family of fellow travelers to bask in its warmth. How can a writer transform the pain of private experience from something isolating into something that links us irrevocably together? Is the queer literature of recent years steeped so deeply in trauma that it forgets to embrace joy? Where, as Hewitt puts it, are the sunlit San Francisco streets? For the poet, whose memoir dwells in the twilight purgatory of a trauma that is ultimately averted, the writing process was marked by a desire not to revel in violence and pain but to critique the social systems that impose them. When Seán Hewitt published All Down Darkness Wide -an aching memoir about the fragility of love and youth-last summer, he found himself grappling with the ghosts of his past and the legacy of trauma in queer literary history. Image courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. Salman Toor, Page from artist’s sketchbook.
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