All Down
Darkness Wide 

In May, I was asked to record what must be my first LGBTQIA+ audiobook, a “queer memoir”, to be read by its author. I must confess, I don’t read an awful lot; I could count on two hands the number of books I’ve read of my own volition and that’s more to do with some undiagnosed ADHD-like condition I’ve had going on all my life. So I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I received the manuscript. But there’s something I love about having zero foreknowledge — of having no expectations — liking walking into a cinema and choosing to watch a movie for which you haven’t even seen the trailer. All too often, our preconceived notions about a piece of work colour our appreciation of it in a way that isn’t fair to the work itself.

For me, this book was like a wide-open door; an invitation not just into a young man’s life, but into the dark recesses of his pain and suffering; the things we dare not speak about, or that it never even occurs to us to speak about. I was struck by how it was told without any sense of self-pity or melodrama; just an honest recollection of the years of the author’s life that have a deeply-moving story to tell. And if that story by itself didn’t have me eagerly scrolling to the next page of the PDF, the enviable prose did. Sometimes I found myself helplessly distracted by how skillfully he used an economy of words to draw scenes, such as a tense drive through an avenue of pine trees while his whole world was falling apart and I had to drag myself back to the here and now of the following lines.

All Down Darkness Wide was written by prize-winning poet, Irish Times book critic and Trinity College lecturer, Seán Hewitt. Seán also narrated the book and it was as though its “voice” had lived in his head for time immemorial as the words just poured into the microphone from the moment we pressed RECORD. There was a symbiosis between his vocal delivery and the text on the page, as though he was recalling this story in real-time: a fountain of thoughts from the top of his head. From the book to the audiobook, this memoir is a masterpiece in the true sense of the word and I feel very proud to have been an atomic part in its journey to its audience.

All Down Darkness Wide was commissioned by Nile Faure Bryan at Penguin Random House UK and was released on the 14th of July.