H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald
Read between January 1st, 2024 and January 23rd, 2024
“But what is grief, if not love persevering?” - Vision [Wandavision (Donney, et al., 2021)]
My New Year's resolution for 2023 was to watch “new” things. Very often, everyone falls into the habit of rewatching an old favorite, but I was doing that quite a lot and had amassed a veritable laundry list of queues across every available streaming service, and there's not a lot of time to watch that new season of “The Great British Baking Show” when I'm constantly rewatching M*A*S*H for the 900th time. That's not to say that I wasn't watching anything new, but I was doing myself a disservice. Therefore, in 2023, I resolved to get out of that rut and only watch things that were new to me, and if I was watching an old favorite, I needed it to have a caveat, maybe I was watching it with someone who'd never seen it before, or perhaps with a commentary track that would impart new information.
For 2024, I have lifted that restriction, but my new resolution is no less strict on my media consumption habits. In the world of literature, I tend to have specific corners of the bookstore or library that I keep to. Mostly sci-fi, a lot of tie-in media, and mostly celebrity biographies. That's not to say I haven't branched out of my own volition, one of the books I enjoyed the most last year was Brooklyn: The Once and Future City by Thomas Campanella, a tome detailing the regional history of the New York City borough that I've called my home for my entire life up to this point. But as I rise the ranks at the bookstore that I work for, it is my duty, nay, my privilege, to be as well-rounded a reader as I possibly can to keep knowledgeable about as many of the books in my store as I can. I might know where nearly every individual book is located, but I can't tell you much about the content of some of the books, particularly books in genres/sections that aren't my forté. These include such areas as “Personal Growth”, the rebrand of “Self-Help” which I find to be occasionally predatory but mostly cheap grifting, or “Romance” which is just not my cup of tea.
Another of those genres is “Nature Writing”. As one can imagine, I'm not an outdoorsy person. Some people are at home in the wilderness, while I prefer the creature comforts rather than the comfort of whatever creatures are living out in the woods. I also know little about caring for and training any animal that isn't a dog or a cat. So it might seem a surprise that for my first foray into “Nature Writing,” I would choose a book about falconing, but the reason for that is simple. Another part of this resolution was to source recommendations from friends and colleagues who frequent those genres. For “H is for Hawk” by Helen MacDonald, the inspiration came from a “shelf talker” card that once lived underneath a copy of the book in my store, written by one of my former Assistant Managers, and a big nature buff, particularly books about birds. The copy that I read was borrowed from another former bookstore compatriot who is still one of my closest friends.
That's a lot of prologue, but that's what you get from me, I'm long-winded and like to hear myself talk. “H is for Hawk” is part memoir but also part micro-history on the art of falconry. But what it is most, is an exploration of intense grief. While my eyes glazed over at points getting deep into the history of goshawks and noteworthy falconers, my heart ached as MacDonald discussed her father's death and the ramifications that it had on her life. Both the short-term effects, having inspired her to adopt a goshawk as a way of coping with the loss, and a distraction from the grief, and the long-term, as she learned about herself through learning about Mabel, her goshawk, since humans are animals after all.
The reason I opened this with a quote from Wandavision was that the book reminded me of that line as MacDonald explained why she went all-in on the goshawk, shunning her previous life as an academic to realize a childhood dream to not spiral into her grief from the sudden loss of her father. I've never experienced the loss of a parent. A grandparent (three in fact), yes. A sibling, yes. But God willing, I won't experience that loss for quite some time, but unlike falconry, in which one has to have a good idea of the art to truly understand what MacDonald is saying, grief and loss are universal and that's what resonated with me so much. Many people say that a good way to cope with loss is to throw yourself into something else, parents who lose a child might shut down from the unimaginable loss, but if they've got another child (or a pet) to care for, that becomes their lightning rod, their tether. MacDonald's tether was Mabel. The way that she found her way out of the darkness through a paper telescope, a favorite game of Mabel's. And it was as true for MacDonald as it was for Wanda Maximoff, her love of her father persevered through raising and training Mabel.
It's also interesting from a dog owner's perspective. The most experience I have with animals outside of dogs is very limited experience with cats and fish. Fish are, obviously an entirely different animal (yes, pun intended) and cats emote and behave in a way that is obvious like dogs do. They make certain noises when they're happy, others when they're unhappy, and they show love through physical contact like licking or climbing on top of you. Birds are an enigma to me. They have feelings and feel pain and sorrow, but I was never quite able to wrap my head around that. Thanks to Helen MacDonald, I have an easier time doing so. I don't think it will change my daily interactions with the pigeons around my neighborhood, but I understand birds a little better thanks to this book.
Overall, I enjoyed “H is for Hawk”, the way that Helen MacDonald writes about both falconry and grief is accessible in a way that I didn't think was possible. I never knew her father or Mabel, but I feel like I did through her writing. In addition, I spent time listening to the audiobook whenever I couldn't read the physical copy and hearing MacDonald read the text made it even more powerful.