... a rapturous account of his years with a boyfriend who suffered from suicidal depression.

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’s book is excellent.

... extraordinary.

Hewitt’s paranoia about leaving Elias alone even briefly – 'How could I keep him safe?' – vibrates off the page.

Blending biography and history with raw personal experience, this memoir is as lyrically written as any book of poetry and advocates for self-expression as a route out of sadness..

This memoir, though ostensibly about a lived life, suggests something spiritual, as befits its title, taken from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. It is also fitting because Hewitt is well-known as a gifted poet, as was Hopkins.

Even if readers don’t know that British author Hewitt is an award-winning poet, they won’t be surprised after encountering the beauty of his prose in this affecting memoir.

When Hewitt, who 'was brought up vaguely Catholic,' grew up in 1990s and 2000s England, he felt he needed to show 'that I was good, that I was kind, that I followed the rules' because 'I had a secret to keep'...The secret was that he was gay at a time when the Catholic Church railed against an equal marriage rights bill passing through Parliament...That is only one of the many challenges Hewitt chronicles in this stunning memoir...The death of a boyfriend when Hewitt attended the University of Cambridge made him think of Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poem 'The Lantern Out of Doors' provides this book’s title...Hewitt frequently references him and 'the boundaries blurring between Hopkins’s work and the life I was in,' especially during the narrative centerpiece: his post-Cambridge relationship with Elias, a young Swedish man he met on a trip to Colombia...The bulk of this book describes Elias and Hewitt’s years together, first in Liverpool and then in Sweden, and Elias’ descent from someone 'confident and chatty and open' to a man who required an extended stay in a psychiatric hospital after contemplating suicide...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..

Laurel Prize winner Hewitt mines the capriciousness of love and pain in this poignant reflection on living with a clinically depressed partner...Unable to find steady work after graduating Cambridge, Hewitt set off on a backpacking trip through South America, where he met Elias...The two quickly fell in love and Elias moved back to Liverpool with Hewitt, despite only knowing him for a short time...However, when the pair moved to Elias’s native Sweden, a crisis unfolded as the Elias Hewitt knew, typically easygoing and boisterous, was ripped away by a struggle with depression that led to a suicide attempt...Amid the devastation—which crescendos at their relationship’s end—Hewitt crafts a moving story of salvation, as he charts his path out of darkness and into self-acceptance...It’s an exquisite vision of queer heartbreak and liberation..