In his debut novel Open, Heaven, Hewitt reminds readers of the complex emotions associated with a first love and how transformative the experience can be…
By Stephan Petar
Do you remember your first love? It probably wasn’t a sweeping romance with heartfelt moments like how it is portrayed in most media – though, if it was, congratulations! For many, first loves are probably the most complicated because they create complex feelings we have never navigated before and in many cases they’re one-sided, especially for queer people if that initial love interest is heterosexual.
Poet, memoirist and novelist Seán Hewitt explores the “desires, yearning and terror of first love” in his debut novel Open, Heaven, set in a remote northern English village. The main character, 16-year-old James, wonders what is beyond his small village and aches for autonomy, tenderness and sex. When Luke moves to a farm close by, James is drawn to him and the pair form a bond. James’ desire unravels over the course of the year, showcasing how electrifying, cruel and transformative first love can be and what it does to other forms of love.
“It seemed a lot of queer literature had relationships or first loves that seemed slightly unrealistic,” Hewitt told IN Magazine. “I hadn’t read many books about unrequited love because, fundamentally, unrequited love is a bit of an unsatisfying subject for a novel.”
Yet the comments he’s received from readers and Heartstopper actor Sebastian Croft, who will narrate the audio version, suggest that the story is universal. “Many have said this exact same thing happened to them, and these are straight and queer people. That seems to be quite a formative experience for them.”
We spoke to Hewitt about writing his debut novel, first loves and love in general, his connection to nature and what he hopes readers will take away from his book.
What inspired Open, Heaven?
I was speaking to friends about our experiences growing up.… It seemed that the common thing between me and a lot of friends was that we all fell in love first with someone who didn’t [love us back] or who was straight.
I was wondering what that does to people: to have that first experience be one that is not reciprocated, that is entirely bound in the world of the imagination and the fictions that we invent. I had the idea of putting us inside the head of a character trying to guess whether his friend might love him back or not. The book is about what love does to our interior worlds.… Then it became about all different forms of love – the love between family, friends, lovers – and how those things all come into contention.
In an Instagram post, you said, ‘It’s a love story, in its own way.’ I feel James is trying to negotiate which love stories are most important to him.
In some ways you can have a friendship that’s like a love story. Both characters find themselves in a sort of romance, but they interpret it in a very different way. My challenge was to write a love story that was unrequited and failed in that respect but wasn’t dismissed as a waste of time. There are so many things that we learn from friendships and from falling in love that don’t require it to be reciprocated.
I talked about your book with Mae Martin and Sabrina Jalees, who have the podcast Benefits with Friends, and they told me people have this fairy tale notion of love and friend relationships, which can be a bit unfair…
I think in some ways literature is responsible for that. When I grew up, I read the Brontës, and the troubled, passionate, slightly uncertain love that is in many of those books became a model for me being able to test how I felt about people. If I didn’t love them like I loved Heathcliff [from Wuthering Heights], then it wasn’t any good to me. We build up these fictional ideals of what love should feel like, and sometimes those ideals stand in the way of us actually experiencing it. In some ways the book is responsible for an image of love, and I wanted to pull down that image without desecrating the idea that love might be an ideal.
I want to discuss your interpretation of the title. To me it’s about vulnerability, which is what James displays. He is this closed person who opens himself to Luke, and whenever he is around Luke he feels as though he is in heaven. What does the title mean to you?
Your interpretation is as good as mine. I see this book as about a character who’s trying to knock his way into this perfect world that he has imagined. I see the title almost as a command, like knocking on the gates of heaven and trying to get inside. James spends so much of the novel obsessing about how he can get to this perfect place he’s imagined, that so much of his life falls by the wayside. He begins to ignore his family and even misreads the person he’s in love with. What he’s most obsessed with is being in love and trying to get to this paradise that he thinks might be waiting for him.
He has to learn through the book how to open himself up, and I think he does learn to do that. He grows as a person, but he also has to confront the idea that he is an idealist and a fantasist.… Love makes a fantasist of all of us.
…Especially after you break up or it fails, and you start creating multiverses on how it could have turned out…
And that’s why I wanted to have this frame narrative as well where he’s looking back. The book doubles as a mystery about memory for James. He’s trying to go back and see things in a different light and to understand what it is he experienced and why it’s still having repercussions throughout his life.
I felt like I was right next to James throughout the novel thanks to your detailed descriptions. You’re like a landscape painter, but your paint is the written word. What is your method for creating these vivid scenes?
I go out and take photographs and videos and note down interesting things. I probably walk for two or three hours a day…and I come back with this archive of images. One thing I tried to do when I was writing the book was to write the season that I was in. So I began writing it in autumn and wrote autumn first.… I tried to keep the seasonality I was experiencing.
Even though it’s a fictional place, I have a real place as a map for myself, and I visited that place quite often. The world of the novel began to feel quite real to me because I would see a lane or a canal and think, ‘I know what James and Luke would be doing here.’ As a writer, you have to feel that you’re walking beside them to make their world feel real, and for me the description of the landscape helps me to situate myself within the novel.
You’ve worked in quite a few literary formats. Why was the novel the next natural thing for you, and what challenges did you face?
The biggest challenge turned out to be the biggest reward. In my poetry and memoir, the base material was reality…a transfiguration of reality. With the novel, the hardest part was trusting that I could make something up. When you make something up, it has to feel real.
The other was narrative. I had to construct a story, and that is its own kind of structuring device. If you have one scene in a book or one sort of character, you then have to invent the other character who pulls that into balance or who adds a degree of complexity to that scene or character. So you begin thinking in a different way than you do when you write a poem. I absolutely loved writing this book once I’d got out of my own way.… I felt such a sense of freedom with it.
What do you want readers to take away from Open, Heaven?
I want readers to look back on their life and give themselves grace as a younger person. This is a book not just for queer people but for anyone who has ever fallen in love. I want people to feel a resurrection of what it feels like to be in love and what a powerful thing that is and how it can change the entire way we see the world and the people around us.
Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt will be available to purchase on April 15, 2025.
STEPHAN PETAR is a born and raised Torontonian, known for developing lifestyle, entertainment, travel, historical and 2SLGBTQI+ content. He enjoys wandering the streets of any destination he visits, where he’s guaranteed to discover something new or meet someone who will inspire his next story.
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