Seán Hewitt | The PEN Ten
In Open, Heaven (Knopf Doubleday, 2025), Seán Hewitt brings us the story of James, a young man growing up in a small village in England. As he struggles with his sexuality, he feels like an outsider in his community—until he meets Luke who has been sent to live on the outskirts of the small village with his aunt and uncle. Now, James sees the possibility for not just love, but peace, and the courage to be himself. Hewitt’s expertly crafted coming of age is simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting as it follows how James tries to find belonging in a place that he feels rejects him.
In conversation with Freedom to Learn Program Assistant Clare Carter, Hewitt discusses what it was like to write diametrically opposed characters, his thoughts on coming of age novels, and how books are a form of freedom. (Bookshop, Barnes & Noble)
Open, Heaven is a story focusing on adolescent James, who is growing up in a secluded English town and struggling with how he fits into his community as a teenager who has come out as gay to his family and to his community. What inspired this coming-of-age story?
I have been interested for so long in what love does to our imaginations. How it makes us write stories and changes the way the world appears to us. It seems to me to live somewhere between fact and fiction, and often the torture of love comes from not being able to tell what is real and what is fantasy. It makes us decode the behaviour of the person we love: was that touch on the arm intentional? Were they trying to catch our eye? I think first love is so powerful because we have no context for it, it overwhelms us, it remakes our vision of ourselves and the world. And what happens when we’re not sure if it’s all in our head, or if it might be about to come true? It was those questions that inspired Open, Heaven, and then over time the story became complicated by all the different forms of love we navigate as we grow up: desire, romance, the love between friends, the love between members of a family. I think the novel is about how those forms of love push and pull us, and how we learn to make our way in a world full of the demands and good fortunes of love.
In the story, James meets Luke, the new kid in town. James carries this fascination with Luke, this all consuming crush that seems to both excite and scare him. When you were writing, how did you get into the mindset of this teenager in love?
This probably wasn’t too hard for me—I am a person who, like most people, has fallen embarrassingly, painfully in love, not just as a teenager, but as an adult. And I think falling in love like that is a sort of sublime experience, both terrifying and wonderful. I can recall easily (and with some embarrassment) the things I have done when I’m in love. And I also spoke to friends, all of whom had these deep, secret memories of the obsession, desire, and madness of a crush.
As I was reading, it seemed that James saw in Luke things he felt he lacked in himself. From the beginning, he describes Luke as someone who was “defiant” and “completely himself.” In contrast there is this theme of shame that James feels throughout the book—shame surrounding his social status, his developing sexuality, and his obligations to his family. Can you speak about the dichotomy between James and Luke?
I think James and Luke begin the book as such different people, at least on the surface, but as the story moves forward, they learn what is beneath the surface, and see each other more truly for who they are. James is shy, self-aware, trapped in what he thinks of as a small world, but he has this expansive imagination, and sees Luke as the person that might free his life into something bigger and grander. Luke, on the other hand, has already experienced so much of life’s heartbreaks, and is perhaps the wiser character in that respect. He teaches James, even without knowing it, what love can be, and that is a bigger, more open thing than James first realises. The two also have different visions of family—James can see family as an obligation, Luke sees it as a dream—and in a way both want what the other has.
I think first love is so powerful because we have no context for it, it overwhelms us, it remakes our vision of ourselves and the world. And what happens when we’re not sure if it’s all in our head, or if it might be about to come true?
Besides the prologue, the book is split up into seasons, beginning with Autumn. What inspired that choice?
I wanted the book to feel lush and pastoral. I had the idea that I might marry the world of someone like Thomas Hardy with the world of someone like Edmund White, and that the movement of the seasons would allow a sort of symphonic progression to the story and the emotions of the characters. As I wrote the first draft, I wrote season by season. So, I began ‘Autumn’ in the autumn, and then wrote the ‘Winter’ sections in the winter, and so on. I felt that way, I could get the most precise, sensory experience of the landscape and the weather onto the page, and hopefully the reader feels that.
James’ obligation towards his family is perhaps best exemplified in the responsibility he feels towards his chronically ill baby brother, Eddie. Can you speak to what Eddie represents in this story?
Eddie gives the sort of unknowing, innocent love that we can so often forget to recognise in our lives. James is so wrapped up in his own story, and in Luke, that he begins to resent his obligations to his younger brother, and is haunted in later life by that. Eddie is pure love, I think.
I still feel guilty about him. We can be so cruel to our characters… He’s one of my favourite characters in the book. In fact, after I’d written it, I began to wonder if the book is not about Luke so much as it is about Eddie. Increasingly, I think that’s perhaps the case.
How do you think someone like James could have balanced his obligations towards his family with this pull towards adventure and adulthood?
It’s a hard question! And in many ways I try not to judge my characters, but instead to have empathy for all of them, in all their mistakes and dreams. James could have let Eddie into his life with Luke, but he is so protective of his romantic world that he doesn’t want to let anyone else inside. I think, if anything, he could have integrated all his obligations together, but that’s a hard thing for anyone to do, nevermind a young man who is only experiencing so many aspects of the world for the first time.
I really think that there has to be a place for messy, uncomfortable thoughts in fiction, and James has many of those in relation to gender.
James has a complicated relationship with women. His mother feels suffocating but it also feels like he craves her understanding. He feels jealous of the girls at school who can openly flirt with the boys. He also uses the subject of girls to bond with other men, including Luke. Can you talk about how you conceptualized this complicated relationship with women and girls that James struggles with?
He really does… I think James has a complicated relationship with everyone and everything. He’s confused by the world, and in some ways, because of how he feels as a gay teenager, he experiences gender in conflicting ways. He doesn’t feel like he’s a boy in the same way as the other boys he knows, and sometimes he fantasizes about being a girl, just because that’s the only way he sees the boys’ desire play out. I really think that there has to be a place for messy, uncomfortable thoughts in fiction, and James has many of those in relation to gender. He’s jealous of girls because boys pay attention to them, and they don’t pay attention to him. He feels locked out of both boyhood and girlhood. There’s a line in the book where James feels like he’s living in a hyphen, always between things, never quite sure which side he’s on.
The title Open, Heaven seems to be an apt description of what it feels like happens to James almost the moment he beholds Luke. After one of their first major encounters James describes “it was like a voice inside me had woken.” And yet, James seems to be tormented by his feelings for Luke as much as it brings him joy. What inspired the title Open, Heaven?
I think of the title as a sort of command, or instruction. An address to heaven. James is constantly trying to knock down the door of heaven, and be let inside. He constructs a dream of what his life could be, and is throwing himself against everything that seems to be barring him out of that dream. There are some lines from William Blake as an epigraph to the book, too, in which the poet talks about all the plants and flowers in spring, ‘opening their heavens’, giving love and sex freely to each other, and the poem seems to ask why people can’t do the same. So, I have William Blake to thank for the idea, and then I rearranged the phrase, adding the comma to make it into a command.
Books are not only a form of freedom, but also a way to develop our imaginations, our empathies, our possibilities in life. In curtailing those freedoms, we curtail the possibilities of life.
The book begins with adult James going back to his hometown after being away for some time. The book returns to adult James at the end, but the very last section is not from adult James’ perspective. Instead, it is from teenage James’ perspective. What inspired the choice to end with the teenage James, rather than the adult James in the present?
I did think about ending with the adult James, in 2022, but then I liked the unpredictability, the sense of momentary disorientation, that might come from switching the timelines unexpectedly before the end of the story. I also have a tendency to dislike novels that all wrap up at the end into a neat bow, and I wanted to leave some things unanswered for the reader, some possibilities that they could keep wondering about. So, although the novel ends with what appears to be an ending, in many ways it keeps going in the unsaid places, the unresolved things of the past that still haunt us.
This story deals with sexuality in the context of a coming-of-age. In the US, we are witnessing books being banned, especially for minors, due to the books’ sexual content. Can you speak to the importance of this type of story being accessible to people across age groups?
I was going to say that banning books is the utmost form of philistinism, but actually I think that’s wrong. A philistine is ignorant of culture, ignorant of its power. Those who ban books are all too aware of the power of books. I don’t know if US readers know the legend of King Canute, but he’s an old British king who thought he was so powerful that he stood at the sea shore and commanded the tide not to come in. Obviously he failed, and he drowned. It seems to be that banning books is a bit like that—we all experience sexuality, we all have emotions and dreams, and books help us to map those things, they don’t make those things exist. So you can take away the maps, but the landscapes of human life are still there, and always will be. Books are not only a form of freedom, but also a way to develop our imaginations, our empathies, our possibilities in life. In curtailing those freedoms, we curtail the possibilities of life.
SEÁN HEWITT’s debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, won the Laurel Prize in 2021, 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. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times (London) as one of their “30 under 30” artists in Ireland. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, is published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Penguin Press in the United States (2022). It was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards, for the Foyles Book of the Year in nonfiction, for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and for a LAMBDA award, and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022. Hewitt is assistant professor in literary practice at Trinity College Dublin, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
