“Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try,” (Macdonald 13).
After her father suddenly dies, Helen Macdonald decides to train a goshawk named Mabel. A longtime falconer, Macdonald has read about but never trained a goshawk, a notoriously difficult type of predatory hawk to tame. Returning to T.H. White’s The Goshawk and analyzing his life while training Mabel and grieving, Macdonald forms an unexpectant bond with her goshawk.
I’d heard of H is for Hawk for years but didn’t really know anything that it was about aside from a woman learning to train a hawk. I didn’t know it was about grief, but when I did it only piqued my interest.
H is for Hawk is an incredibly well-written and detailed memoir about loss, falconry, animals, and author T.H. White. Some readers may get annoyed by how much of this memoir is also about T.H. White’s life, but it has it’s purpose. I didn’t know about him until Macdonald’s book so was surprised by his legacy as a writer (anyone ever watched The Sword in the Stone? You have White to thank for that!), his history as a falconer, as well as his own traumatic and repressed upbringing. While both White and Macdonald are very different people who lived very different lives, there is an escape both are reaching for through their goshawks. They are each looking to cope through something traumatic through a wild animal, finding kinship in the wildness of their own emotions.
While some reviewers have mentioned they would have liked more vulnerability from Macdonald about her grief and that she seems to skirt away from talking about her own feelings and her relationship with her dad in favour of talking about White (which I believe there is truth to), I also think she does talk about grief in her own way. The way she describes the madness of grief and how it completely rocked her life was so realistic that I am happy she talked about it because it is a part of grief that is very rarely acknowledged. But her grief is also shown in her obsession with Mabel, her need for distraction through her goshawk. Even if Macdonald isn’t telling you exactly how she is feeling or grieving, she is showing it often throughout the book and in her relationship to Mabel.
H is for Hawk is a unique, vulnerable, and different way of talking about grief that I think many grievers will find a surprising kinship to while non-grievers will see a side of grief they may be unfamiliar with. It’s a well-written, well-researched, and beautiful memoir. I’m so glad this book found it’s way to me!
Publication: July 31 2014
Publisher: Grove Press
Pages: 300 pages (Paperback)
Source: Library
Genre: Non Fiction, Memoir, Grief
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤.75
Summary:
As a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T. H. White’s tortured masterpiece, The Goshawk, which describes White’s struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest. When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel for ?800 on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.
Sarah O'Connor 