Though it was “scorched earth,” Palley reflects that the Powerhouse “pales in comparison to fires now. His debut memoir, INTO THE INFERNO: A Photographer’s Journey Through California’s Megafires and Fallout (259 pp., Blackstone Publishing, $28.99), a kind of narrative companion to his stunning 2018 volume of photographs, “Terra Flamma: Wildfires at Night,” opens: “A wall of fire careened toward me from a few hundred yards away.” It is 2013 and the Powerhouse Fire is ravaging Southern California, prompting the then-novice wildfire photographer - who almost died in the blaze - to get proper training for his vocation.
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.Ī photographer by training, Stuart Palley understands the power of opening a story in medias res. 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. 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. Woven into this portrait of depression’s maelstrom is the author’s own queer coming-of-age. His first memoir offers a rapturous account of his years with a boyfriend who suffered from suicidal depression. The mind in question in ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE: A Memoir (229 pp., Penguin Press, $26) is that of Hewitt, an Irish writer in his early 30s who is already a Laurel Prize-winning poet and critic, and a teaching fellow in literature at Trinity College Dublin. Together they form a harmonious collage of worldview and character, a wunderkammer of experiences in a life fully lived. This narrative both coheres and bogs down the book’s overall movement, though her insights remain sound and her sentences beautiful and lucid.
Threaded throughout her travels is the story of how, “adrift on a sea of shifting hormones,” she fell sway to an emotional affair after 17 years with her sculptor husband. Not all of the essays live up to the standard of that opener, but they maintain this compelling persona. She recalls an embrace they shared at the end of their meeting: “I had recognized her perfume - Amazone - because it had come from my own bottle.” Our narrator has made a stunning entrance, proved herself intrepid and empathetic, gifted with the dispassionate gaze of a born observer. For the next 20 years, she returns to the hotel with the book, doomed never to find Masha. Before departing, DeSanctis agrees to bring Masha an illustrated edition of Pushkin’s fairy tales on her next trip. DeSanctis reacts with pity rather than anger and soon the interloper is toweling the guest’s forehead and tucking her in. Upon returning to her room with a fever, she encounters a hotel employee named Masha - part concierge, part Kremlin informant - trying on her clothes. Marcia DeSanctis, an award-winning travel writer and longtime news producer, opens hers, A HARD PLACE TO LEAVE: Stories From a Restless Life (313 pp., Travelers’ Tales, $27.95), with an episode in which a younger version of herself is on assignment in Cold War Moscow.
The best essay collections unfold the tensions inherent in ethics, intimate relationships and art, and in the process offer a portrait of the writer’s mind.
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