Maitreyi Anantharaman: Happy Wings Week, everyone! I will admit to not knowing much about this book before I scooped it up at the library and had fun with this moving—at times extremely funny!—mix of nature writing and memoir and literary biography.
Brandy Jensen: It was also my first time reading this book. In recent years I’ve somewhat soured on memoirs billed as “genre-bending,” as I tend to find it’s a way of saying they do a handful of things adequately instead of one thing really well, but this was not the case here! A really superb example of how you can make something singular and special by blending together more recognizable forms of writing.
David Roth: I’d had this on the shelf for a few years after receiving it as a gift [lowers sunglasses] from my wife, who I learned upon finally opening it got it at a very competitive price, used, from Bridgton Books in Bridgton, Maine. And it was precisely because of how it was hailed—how widely but also as this genre-defying breakthrough in personal writing—that it took this convening of the DRAB High Council for me to get to it. Well it turns out the book fucking rocks. Just sentence by sentence, this is one of the best pieces of writing I’ve read in ages.
Kelsey McKinney: This is so interesting because I also began reading this book in the same spirit of apprehension even though I have read it before. I read H is for Hawk within like six months of its publication because everyone said it was great, and loved it the first time. But since then, so many books have been billed as similar to it that I have really disliked, that I was wary that maybe I had been wrong to begin with. Plus, I found a ribbon for “Adulting” in the back of this book that I guess I was using as a bookmark? It seemed like an omen. Luckily, this was not my experience! It was gorgeous this time as well.
Patrick Redford: Was one of those The Friend? I loved that book, and I was a little apprehensive about H is for Hawk because I was worried it would be too much like Nuñez, and also worried I wouldn’t like it because a family member is a big-time hater, but it was so lovely, even if I felt the whole T. H. White current dragged on (more on this later…), because Helen Macdonald is such a gifted writer. As Roth said, their sentences flow so cleanly, without needing to justify themselves or hew to convention. I am glad I did not read it when Kelsey did because I was in extremely close proximity to a parent-style grieving situation and I think, like Macdonald, I was too close to the thing to be able to, as they wrote towards the end of the book, hold “something the size of a mountain in my arms.”
KM: No! I liked The Friend to be honest. I shan’t be listing the enemies here, but I think many people mistook what makes this book so great (heart! Passion! Cool subject!) for its format.
DR: Yeah this feels like the sort of book, just given the incredibly high level of craft involved, that you can’t reverse-engineer. Just banging on your desk at the publishing house demanding S Is For Salamander from someone about their emotionally resonant relationship with their mid-life pet isn’t going to do it. One person could have written this book, and they did.
BJ: Yeah, you need to be the sort of child who reads T. H. White’s The Goshawk at 8 years old if you’re to grow into the person who writes this book.
DR: I’ll confess that while I was wowed by the writing from the start, I was not initially clear on how this was going to be … an interesting book. I can and fairly regularly do read things just because the language is great; I’m a big Annie Dillard person and a lot of her stuff is just like describing different walks she went on. But Macdonald’s writing about both the experience of grief and the natural world was astonishing throughout, and the connection to the White book, and to White’s tragic and conflicted life, I thought helped pull the story both forward (in the sense that there is another person and story to care about in parallel to Macdonald’s own) and outward (in the sense that it contextualizes both this weird pursuit and the various things that would lead a person to it). And then, in what is almost a feat of sportswriting to me, Macdonald really makes the process of training their hawk very exciting to read about. Like I was borderline pumping my fist when they got it together in the early stages of training, and the first times that the bird is flying free in the field were just incredibly exciting and moving to me.
PR: Sportswriting is exactly it. Mabel was a problem, until she was A Problem; H is also for Hooper.
DR: The Bird Is A Bucket.
KM: Almost instantly, within the first 20 pages, there’s this part where Macdonald writes, “It was about that time a kind of madness drifted in. Looking back, I think I was never truly mad. More mad north-north-west,” that just kind of blew me away on this read because it’s such an obvious example of how great writing comes from an individual not diluting themselves with what they think other people want. Like of course I know the idea of true north, but it is not in my lexicon. The ability to think of yourself as mad in the north-north-west sense is just beyond me, which is how a great book should be.
BJ: I think both the exquisite descriptions of their mental and emotional unraveling and the sportwriting aspect both come down to their almost supernatural ability to pay close attention. Their abilities as “a watcher,” as they describe it in the book, which links everything again to the disposition they inherited from their father, and why their grief becomes so enormous. I don’t think I have ever paid attention to anything the way they are able to pay attention.
DR: That’s a very good way of putting it. Obviously part of the basic appeal/thrill of reading good writing is seeing something from a different perspective or in a new way, but there is an otherworldly level of care in here, and Macdonald has the craft to make little decisions—about what to describe in a room, how quickly or slowly to play a moment out—that unlock vastnesses without having to actually try to paint all of it. Grief is a very difficult thing to write about; it’s too big, and too individuated. But in so many places in this book there is some keenly observed thing in a room or a moment that just expands to fill in all this imaginative space.
PR: On that note, something that I found moving and honest was the way Macdonald was attuned to Mabel’s sensibilities but then consciously pulled back from becoming a hawk. A person can’t become a hawk, and the enbirdification that is obvious from the first page is so effective because, while it might seem like The Process itself, it is eventually presented as a step. The deliberateness, even when they are flailing and bleeding and basically incapable of being a person, was so moving because it was both familiar and temporary, and they don’t deny its power.
Early on, Macdonald talked about how the perfect place to find goshawks was a sort of “alternative countryside,” as opposed to “grand, leisured dreams of landed estates,” which is a thread they follow pretty explicitly in regards to the hawk’s place in “nature,” but also follows with subtlety on their one journey. As for the former, I’ve found myself thinking so much about the passage from one of the final time Macdonald flies Mabel and encounters the old racist couple. None of this is separate from any of this is such a grounding force in the work. Human ugliness is not distinct from whatever pristine vision of nature still holds; it’s inextricable from it. Goering’s falcons didn’t ask to be made into symbols.
MA: There’s a line early in the book: “The wild can be human work.” I returned to that a lot—Patrick, you’re right that Macdonald is able to kind of estrange themself from the hawk, but also there’s this sense of dependency. And the bit with the racist couple again subverts the idea of the untouched “Old England.” Everything is human work, constructed by humans, imagined by them, remembered by them.
BJ: Yeah this sense of estrangement and eventual return keeps coming up in the book, whether it’s a Freudian repetition compulsion or Macdonald becoming something inhuman in order to once again become perhaps more deeply human than before. It’s a real testament to their writing that at every point along that journey, no matter how disordered the thinking they are describing, I thought “okay yes, this seems right.” Like, Patrick you said “a person can’t become a hawk” and that’s a very obvious truth, but at certain points reading this, when Macdonald seems to believe they can, I thought maybe it’s possible. You go a little mad alongside them.
KM: It is interesting how close to magic this book sits. There’s a sense that if you are quiet for long enough and focused for long enough, you might be able to see the space where our reality shifts into another. There are so many parts, especially when they’re talking about their father, where two realities feel as if they can be true at once: he is dead and alive, they are a bird and not a bird, they have to leave Mabel and no they don’t. I felt such an affection, as a reader, for Macdonald in these liminal moments because it feels so muddy like grief often does.
DR: Magic is a good way of putting it. Time and space is weirdly permeable in this book, in the way that it can be when you’re feeling bad—hours or afternoons or days disappearing into the next, or just sort of fading out as they’re happening—but also in a way that makes the experience of reading it kind of dreamlike and uncanny. You’re generally clear on where you are within a moment, the writing is very lucid and all that, but the moments themselves kind of rise and fall, or come and go, or recede and recede further, in a way that had me wrongfooted a lot of the time. I liked that a lot.
BJ: Yes! For me this was especially pointed when it came to something as straightforward as “how big is this bird.” On the one hand, Mabel seems like this massive, dominating force, but then you get references to how she is all of two pounds, and the shape of her could never remain really stable in my mind. Not due to any descriptive insufficiency, just because she was both large and small at the same time.
PR: Almost like the shape of a loss like the one Macdonald experienced, one whose shifting contours are not quite outlined but hinted at when they see a scrap of his handwriting, or talks to their mother, or does something as emotionally hefty as give his eulogy. I liked that they resisted conceiving of grief as a process, something with steps that can be digested. Your grief is not chunked out or worn smooth, your life, everything else, is what changes.
I appreciated the formal sophistication of weaving the memoir and nature writing into the T. H. White biography, but something about that thread of the book came off as somewhat flat to me, probably because the first half or so was too repetitive. While Macdonald is a deft enough writer I still probably enjoyed those bits—the way their obsession with another English writer who tried to use a goshawk to square his own personal circle echoed with their story was totally resonant and worth exploring—they seemed sort of oblique to the really sharp stuff. My sense is that I might be the only one who feels this way?
DR: I found them interesting enough, and I appreciated the counterpoint. But I do think that the sublimation at work in the White story, where he is trying to make himself into someone that he is not and cannot be, using this poor hawk as a proxy, is different from the one that animates Macdonald’s half of the story. There’s still obviously an element of mania to all this—to this particular shared obsession, and also fundamentally to falconry as a pursuit—but resonated most for me, which was the urge to find some way to become more or less than human so as to avoid some of the the pain of being alive, does not quite fit neatly across the two of them. For someone who is doing this insane thing, in a way they themselves acknowledge is pretty nutty, at a moment of tremendous personal difficulty, Macdonald maintains a perspective on it that White never touched. I still think it’s a useful thing to have in the book, though, both because of how it allows for graceful takeoffs and landings into the history and lore of falconry and because of how it connects the fundamental transference of the falconry relationship across these two very different experiences of it.
KM: Patrick, I don’t think you’re wrong to be honest. I have a really bad habit of scanning when I’m reading something that I don’t find exciting or mesmerizing, and there were so few points in this book where I ended up doing that, but I did do it a couple of times during the T. H. White stuff. What’s funny is that after I read this the first time, I really tried to read the T. H. White book, and just could not get through it at all. A real and beautiful example of how a good writer can make you care about something that otherwise you would not give one shit about.
BJ: For me the White stuff was both fascinating and necessary, particularly as a way of troubling the traditional dichotomy of civilized vs. wild. Both his childhood as a Brit in India and his experience of English boarding school I think were important reminders of the cruelty of what we have sometimes thought of as civilizing forces. And he wrote about Arthurian legend, which adds another layer of the imagined English past. Plus he was a real freak and I will always read about guys like that.
DR: He should’ve been putting hoods and restraints on consenting partners and not on a damn bird. But I’m glad he at least got to buy some cool leather stuff.
MA: White’s work was also something they were returning to, something they had encountered and processed one way in childhood and were now processing a different way as an adult, and so it functioned a bit like a means of measurement. “The book you are reading is my story. It is not a biography of Terence Hanbury White. But White is part of my story all the same. I have to write about him because he was there.” I thought it was valuable in that way.
PR: Means of measurement is a great way of putting it, maybe I should have taken a cue from Macdonald and done some more deliberate watchering of the White biography sections. One last thing I wanted to ask about: What’s up with the title? It came off, to me, like a joke, one of the many funny, subtle ones that they put on every page. There’s something childish about it, situating the parent-child relationship that drives it forward. I loved it.
KM: I can truly imagine the insane meetings they must have had about the title of this book because like … what are you supposed to title this book? Oh My Goshawk? I do find it childish in a way, but I think it’s an iconic title because you cannot imagine this book with another title. Or at least, I can’t.
DR: This is embarrassing but I think at some point I had this book confused with those raised-text-on-the-cover airport mysteries that are like [Letter] Is For [Crime Thing Starting With That Letter]. So I was like, "Wow seems like they really got this one right, I don’t remember seeing this kind of praise for G Is For Garotte.”
BJ: That series rules. Sue Grafton forever.
DR: That’s what we’re reading next.
MA: Yeah, I think the title is winking in some ways, though I do also think the book is very much about reading! Another thing I kept noticing was the little etymology lessons—in the naming of Mabel, and then there’s raptor from the Latin for "robber" or bereavement from the Old English bereafian.
PR: I’m glad you pointed that out, it’s so true. Every single Etymology Moment had me hooting, like a New Yorker Eurostep in miniature. In the hands of lesser writers, those can come off as highfalutin Webster's defines … but not here. I also clocked precisely one use of accipitrine, which is such a beautiful word, that, if I were writing such an accipitrine book, I would not be able to use it any fewer than 100 times.
DR: Yeah, that’s showboating for sure, but I enjoyed it. If you remember the guy from the old And1 Tour that would walk around the court with a mic yelling “OH BABY” whenever one of the And1 guys would start doing crazy dribbling shit, that was me in those moments.
BJ: I was like that when they would reference the old falconry guides. I’ve never been more interested in what some 16th-century guy had to say about the feeding of quail versus rabbit.
DR: Books used to be so cool. Just a guy holding forth about the personality traits of different animals, how they are “alike to a gracefull ladie” or whatever. We need to bring that back.
BJ: Did anyone finish this book thinking they would be a competent falconer? I did not.
DR: I’m sure I’d be good at it. Seems like the kind of thing I could and would do well.
MA: Roth, you should write about Marvin! T is for Turtle!
DR: I would like to read some 16th-century treatises on Turtlekeeping.
PR: D is for David-is-a-friend-to-all-creatures-accipitrine-and-chelonian-alike.
