Seán Hewitt's novel looks at why first love is so hard to forget

In the past six years, U.K.-born writer Seán Hewitt has published five books in a wide range of genres — from poems to memoirs and literary criticism.

His latest work, Open, Heaven, is his first novel, and follows 16-year-old James living in a rural English village, Thornmere. 

"I think everything I've written before had been based in some way on my own life, or on real life at least. And the world of fiction where you get to make it all up seems like a lot of fun," he said on Bookends with Mattea Roach. 

"Once I'd exhausted the reserves of my own life in a memoir, I kind of had a blank slate to reimagine what a book might be, and this is the book that emerged."

In Open, Heaven, James has just come out to his family and community and is feeling shut down, isolated and filled with yearning. Then, he falls hard for Luke, who's handsome, unpredictable and a little older.

As time goes on, the two boys grow closer and transform each other's lives. But because James can't control his all consuming crush and ensuing fear of rejection, the line between reality and fiction begins to blur and he must decide whether to risk everything in his life for the possibility of love.

Hewitt is an assistant professor of English at Trinity College Dublin. He joined Roach to discuss the difference between love and desire and why first love sometimes resonates years later.

Mattea Roach: Most of the novel takes place in 2002, but we start in 2022 where James, the protagonist, is in his mid 30s. He's returning to his childhood home of Thornmare. What is he looking for exactly?

Seán Hewitt: When we first meet James in 2022, he's just going through a divorce and his husband has said something to him that I think unravels him a little bit. He says that he can love his husband, but not desire him. 

James can't see these two things, love and desire, as being parts of the same thing, those are two distinct experiences to him. He realizes at this point that his inability to reconcile love and desire are starting to upend his life — resulting in a divorce, but other things too. 

He's going back in search of the origin of that pattern. Where did it all start? I think he's looking for other things too. There's a few things that he loses control of over the course of this novel that I think reverberate into his future. So he's looking, I suppose, to revisit a past that doesn't feel like it's past.

That distinction that you mentioned between love and desire, that James is going through this divorce in part because his partner feels that he can love but not desire. For many people, those two might seem fundamentally intertwined, like you can't disambiguate the two. What does it mean for them to be separated?

Open, Heaven is a sort of love story, but not a romance. It's interested in the gap between those two things. What I mean by that is that desire propels James in his life, and desire is always wanting something but not necessarily having it. The second you have it, you, by definition, don't want it anymore because you have it.

Love is something much different. It's reciprocal. It's sustaining.- Seán Hewitt

Love is something much different. It's reciprocal. It's sustaining. It's not kind of selfish or grasping, but James can't feel fully in love unless he's also on edge.

There has to be a sort of risk to love to keep him interested and that causes problems, as you would imagine.

I think a lot of people can relate to this idea of their first love being something that sticks with them. You can have many other incredible loves, but that first one will always have a bit of a pull. Why do you think that is?

As a teenager, which is often when you fall in love first, you have no context and no experience of so many emotions and you feel them all for the first time. There is this kind of vertiginous, operatic feeling of emotion that comes the first time you feel it.

So love feels big and life changing. 

No matter how many times someone tells you there'll be other people that you fall in love with or you'll get over it. You don't feel like that's possible because you've never done it before.

But I also think that our first experience of love changes us, especially when we're in such a formative time of our life. We come to know things about ourselves; about how we relate to other people through that first experience, and perhaps people feel something of that change becoming permanent. 

Our first experience of love changes us, especially when we're in such a formative time of our life.- Seán Hewitt

There's still the sense, even if your first love is gone and no longer there. You're in some way shaped by them or around them and you remember something of that shape in your coming-of-age.

Do you feel still shaped by your first experiences with love?

I think I do. I mean, I say this with the proviso of, I'm kind of a romantic and when I fall in love, it's a big deal and I embarrass myself and I make foolish decisions and all of that. No matter how many times you think, "I won't do that again." Nevertheless, you do.

Everyone can recognize patterns in how they fall in love. And no matter how much you think you'll resist the pattern, you don't because it's too powerful a feeling. I remember my first love. I mean, I'm similar to James in a way that I repeatedly fell in love with straight boys because they were the only kind of available people where I was.

It's no particular thing about straight men. It's just that there was no one else when I was growing up. So they became people that my imagination latched on to — I think for better or for worse, usually for worse.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Sarah Cooper.