Memoir Review: H Is for Hawk

One of my Nonfiction November reads was H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, a highly-acclaimed memoir about grief and hawks (yes, an unusual combination) that had been sitting on my bookshelves for much too long.

This is a unique memoir about how the author dealt with her father's sudden death by getting and training a goshawk, known to be one of the more difficult hawks to train. Helen was already an experienced falconer, but training a goshawk was a different experience for her. The memoir follows the parallel paths of her grief over the loss of her father, a photojournalist who died abruptly, and her training of Mabel, her new goshawk. It also weaves in all kinds of history of hawks and falconry, including the experiences and writings of T.H. White, author of The Once and Future King and other acclaimed books, who also trained a goshawk--and wrote a book about it--while dealing with personal emotional pain. As Helen and Mabel tramp across the countryside near Cambridge, England, together, they slowly learn to trust each other, as Helen gradually deals with her staggering grief. It is mostly a solitary journey between the two of them, as Helen isolates herself and focuses all of her attention on the hawk. Here, on her way home from planning her father's memorial service, Helen muses about her state of mind. You can see the thoughtfulness of her prose and the exquisite way she describes and integrates the natural world into the memoir:

"On the way home, I felt a great and simple sadness. I missed my dad. I missed him very much. The train curved and sunlight fell against the window, obscuring the passing fields with a mesh of silver light. I closed my eyes against the glare and remembered the spider silk. I had walked all over it and had not seen it. It struck me then that perhaps the bareness and the wrongness of the world was an illusion; that things might still be real, and right, and beautiful, even if I could not see them--that if I stood in the right place, and was lucky, this might somehow be revealed to me. And the sun on the glass and the memory of the shining field, and the awful laughter, and the kindness of that morning's meeting must have thinned the armour of silence I'd worn for months, because the anger was quite gone now, and that evening as we drove to the hill, I said in a quiet voice, "Stuart [a hawking friend], I'm not dealing with things very well at the moment.""

This memoir appeared on more than 25 "Best Books of 2015" lists and was nominated for several prestigious literary prizes. It is beautifully written, introspective, and thoughtful, and I learned a lot about hawks, history, and T.H. White (I loved The Once and Future King as a child). But it was also a slow read for me, though it was interesting and moving. Perhaps that is as it should be, since it follows Helen's journey through her grief, which is often a slow, difficult slog. I knew nothing at all about hawks, so I learned a lot, but, like Helen, I did lose my father about six years ago, so I could certainly relate to her sorrow. The book is as much about the natural world as it is a personal memoir, and reading it is an immersive experience. This memoir combines contemplation, nature, and history and depicts the resilience of human nature.

300 pages, Grove Press

Blackstone Audio

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Listen to a sample of the audiobook here, read by the author as she describes goshawks and her experiences in nature, and/or download it from Audible.

 

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