January Not Fiction Book Discussion

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald explores that most universal of human experiences, grieving the loss of a loved one. "It happens to everyone," she writes. "But you feel it alone." Macdonald's father died suddenly of a heart attack on a London street at a time when her personal life and career were in transition, and to manage her grief and sense of being untethered, Macdonald turned to her lifelong avocation of falconry. She chose, however, to train the most notoriously difficult and lethal raptor, a goshawk. Macdonald goes beyond mere interest or distraction to very near the edge of obsession, unplugging her telephone and asking her friends to leave her alone while she trains her hawk. In its wildness, it represents for Macdonald immunity from loss and grief: "The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief and numb to the hurts of human life." Yet she names her hawk Mabel, meaning lovable or dear, and Mabel gradually teaches Macdonald how to reconnect with the world around her through curiosity, radical empathy, and the desire to nurture the young hawk. In the moment of naming her, Macdonald notes, "And as I say it, it strikes me that all those people outside the window who shop and walk and cycle and go home and eat and love and sleep and dream--all of them have names. And so do I. 'Helen,' I say." How does Macdonald ultimately resolve the paradox posed by her grief?

H is for Hawk includes precise and evocative nature writing. Through her descriptions of Mabel the bird rather than Mabel the myth, Macdonald asks us to reconsider our relationship with the wild. She notes that many nature books and myths of human-to-animal metamorphoses were "quests inspired by grief or sadness" in which, to heal their hurt, humans fled to the wild. Macdonald realizes, however, that this is "a beguiling but dangerous lie . . . the wild is not a panacea for the human soul . . . I'd fled to become a hawk, but in my misery all I had done was turn the hawk into a mirror of me." Where do you think this persistent literary idea of the wild as a healing force comes from? What are its positive and negative influences on our relationship with our environment?

Macdonald also includes bibliomemoir/biography in H is for Hawk, exploring her relationship to T.H. White's book The Goshawk, which she first read at the age of eight. In it, White describes his own unsuccessful and inadvertently cruel attempt to train a goshawk. She initially dislikes the book, wondering, "Why would a grown-up write about not being able to do something?" But she feels compelled to reread his book and wrestle with his example. "The book you are reading is my story," she writes, " . . . It is not a biography of Terence Hanbury White. But White is a part of my story all the same. I have to write about him because he was there." How does Macdonald's understanding of White's book evolve over time, and how does his story inform her own?

In an interview for Guernica Aditi Sriram asked Macdonald what story "wanted to be told" when she sat down to write H is for Hawk. She replied, "I wanted it to be a memoir about grief, certainly. In England there is this notion of the 'misery memoir' as a genre, the 'misery lit' genre. And I’m really happy for it to be seen as that, because it was a very miserable time. But I also wanted it to be nature writing, and I wanted it to be a biography. Having all those three genres in one book was a very definite decision I made. What grief does is shatter narratives: the stories you tell about your life, they all crumble at this point. Things become very confused, your agency is called into question, you’re not really sure who you are or what you’re facing, and I wanted that confusion to be in the text." How do you feel about Macdonald's decision to combine three genres in one narrative? Is it successful?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, January 5, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, January 21, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.