H is for Hawk is a grief memoir. When Helen Macdonald was a child, she was obsessed with being a falconer. She read all the books and learned all the jargon. When her father dies, she decides to make good on that obsession, buying a goshawk and naming her Mabel. At the same time, she spirals into a deep depression. This book is the account of that period of her life. But it’s so much more than that.
This book hit me hard. I lost my dad in a horrifying manner just before the pandemic, and I spent the next 6 months fully in the wilderness. Between losing him and my business getting crushed by the lockdowns, it was one of the hardest periods of my life.
Several times in H is for Hawk it felt like Macdonald was writing my story for me (better than I ever could, of course):
Sometimes when light dawns it simply illuminates how dismal circumstances have become. Every morning I wake at five and have thirty seconds’ lead-time before despair crashes in. I don’t dream of my father any more; I don’t dream of people at all. I walk over winter sandflats, past storm-pools of fog-reflecting water packed with migrant birds stranded by the weather, unable to fly south for winter. Sometimes I dream I’m climbing trees that crack and fall, or sailing tiny boats that overturn in frozen seas. They are pathetic dreams. I don’t need an analyst to explain them. I know now that I’m not trusting anyone or anything any more. And that it is hard to live for long periods without trusting anyone or anything. It’s like living without sleep; eventually it will kill you.
While she documents her own grief, she tells the story of T.H. White’s attempts to domesticate the same type of bird in the 1930’s, as he detailed in his book “The Goshawk”.
H is for Hawk ends up being three stories in one: Macdonald’s memoir of her father and her own sadness and depression, a kind of biography of T.H. White, who it seems was a bit of a nitwit, and a fantastic account of trying to build trust with a wild animal.
Here’s a short clip of a BBC interview where she talks about what her life became in this period:
The whole episode is here, and it’s worth listening to.
This is an instant classic. It’s inclusion in the NYT Best of the Century list is what put me onto it, and I’ve already bought it as a Christmas gift for several people.
