For anyone who has felt an affinity with animals, particularly birds, this memoir—H is for Hawk—is not to be missed.  What a remarkable evocation of animal life and of the animal dimension of our human existence.  The author, Helen Macdonald, seems to have lived so closely with her trained goshawk, Mabel, that she has inhabited the creature.  Or perhaps it has inhabited her. 

After months of patient practice, they hunt together, and though Macdonald intuitively hates killing, she is so drawn into the catch-and-kill mindset of Mabel, that, as she explains, the bird takes her to “the very edge of being human” then beyond.  “I crept and walked and ran. I crouched.  I looked.  I saw more than I’d ever seen.  The world gathered about me.  It made absolute sense.  But the only things I knew were hawkish things, and the lines that drew me across the landscape were the lines that drew the hawk: hunger, desire, fascination, the need to find and fly and kill.”  And when Mabel the goshawk finally succeeds, bringing down a pheasant then mauling it in her powerful talons, Mcdonald has to face her own participation in the violence, a participation that will be familiar to anyone who has ever hunted at all.

Mcdonald’s genre-bending memoir was written after the sudden unexpected death of her father, which was a cataclysmic event.  He was a widely respected journalistic photographer and a winsome, caring father, so Mcdonald’s book is, in large part, a meditation on grieving.  It is also a kind of specialist’s guidebook, rife with quirky hawk-training lore.  And it is part biography, toggling back and forth from the life of the English author T.H. White, famous for his novel The Sword in the Stone, which feature hawks used by medieval hunters.  However, the real marvel of this peculiar memoir, with all its emphasis on falconry, is not so much how Mcdonald becomes attuned to the goshawk but how she realizes her humanness in the process.  When Mabel is mantling wings over yet another captured rabbit, “tail spread, eyes burning, nape-feathers raised in a tense and feral crouch,” the human side of Macdonald is reawakened.  Out of mercy, she reaches out to the squealing animal, breaking its neck by pushing its head away while yanking its back legs.  She doesn’t shy from her role, as distressing as it is, but she experiences a return to the sensitive, cognitive awareness that she has been suppressing during this mindless time of grieving.  “Hunting,” she realizes, “makes you animal, but the death of an animal makes you human.”

Her recollection of that paradoxical moment reminds me of the first time I shot a dove, using an arrow I had tethered with fishing line so that it would not fly beyond the chain link fence of my boarding school in Ethiopia.  Hitting any bird had been theoretical until then, and I was sick with what I had done, as the dove flapped weakly, hanging upside down in a cedar tree, impaled and dangling from the tangled line.  Panicked by my approach, it made a tremendous effort to fly free, wings smacking branches and head bobbing.  I was too startled and disturbed to touch it even after it hung still, so my more-experienced friend had to slide it off the arrow and pinch its small skull between curled fingers, snapping his wrist so that the head detached and the bird plummeted to the ground, out of pain.

Believe it or not, that moment increased my love for birds.  It didn’t stop me from hunting for more, killing a couple dozen with that bow and later with a slingshot.  But with every bird that I got to know in this violent way—sneaking under a canopy of trees and aiming slowly and eventually holding the stunned creature in my hand where I could feel the soft dustiness of its feathers and the galloping of its small heart—I was becoming more in love, so that after a year or two of such teenage assassinations and after even teaching myself how to stuff the birds taxidermy-style, emptying out their skulls and preserving their skin and tiny bones with powdered borax, I would never again want to shoot one, would only want to know more about them, and to recognize them by their silhouettes or their peculiar markings or their varied songs.  The Lilac-Breasted Roller or Emerald Kingfisher or Superb Starling, and eventually all the wonderful American birds, including predators such as the Bald Eagle and Kestrel and Barred Owl or, like Mcdonald’s own trained Mabel, the Goshawk.

I fell so in love with birds that now I go to the woods at a state park here in Iowa and stop often to watch—shooting photos if I can.  And I lament the decline of bird populations all around the world, which journalists have declared to be down by three billion in the U.S. and Canada alone, or roughly one in three.  I feel guilty, too, about having contributed to this worldwide decline, although I don’t think I could have ever come to care about birds as much as I do if I had not had such moments of direct contact.

In the writing of this book, Mcdonald went to the edge of being human and beyond, but she returned, and we are all the better for it.  It is in her humanness that she helps us to understand better the tortured, conflicted failures of T.H. White as a novice hawker and the depths of our own grief after losing someone we love.  But more importantly, Mcdonald shows us the need to come back to community, back into being who we were made to be.  Mabel, the goshawk, has brought her back to being Macdonald the human, and that is the true marvel of their unique, sometimes disturbing memoir.  I recommend the book wholeheartedly!

BE WITH ME ALWAYS is a rich read, full of relational insight. The essays have a risky “out there” feel because the author, Randon Billings Noble, is not afraid to explore her own raw emotions. I relate to her inclination to go back in time, exploring the relationships that haunt her the most. Like her, I look back at moments when relationships heated up or teetered on the brink of dissolving or when, after a particularly hard break-up, I feared that maybe I would remain forever alone, clearly “incompatible.”

Noble, at times, seems in the thrall of an extreme desire for an impossibly intense romantic bond—which manifests most strongly when she describes a past lover who was, in a sense, her own personal “Dracula.” Her essays, which rely on surprising literary comparisons, bring to mind the forbidden relational dimensions in many stories and movies, reminding us how tantalizing those dimensions can be while at the same time raising the specter of emotional pain. Falling in love with Dracula is bound to end poorly because of his nature and because of the obsession he arouses. And the stories of star-crossed lovers are inevitably full of thwarted desire and loss. Somebody is going to get hurt.

One of the times Noble seems to stretch a bit too far for a relational analogy is when she likens herself to Ann Boleyn, admiring “the power to captivate a man, to enchant him, to possess him so fully that he thought of little else.” For Boleyn, the man in question was Henry the VIII, who repeatedly divorced or beheaded wives because of being so captivated. Boleyn must have known, at some level, what she was risking, and Noble seems a bit too willing to romanticize what was essentially pathological. But she probably knows this, and she bravely explores the terrain anyway.

I respect her intent to stay faithful to the man she eventually marries, letting go of the haunting lovers of her past and becoming a mother even though her unexpected twins threaten her sense of a future self. And I respect her honest admission that she is still sometimes haunted or pulled to the side romantically, as in her remarkably inventive essay “The Heart as a Torn Muscle.” Noble’s open admissions help me—and probably many other readers—to work through some of the hard-to-process subterranean stuff that we feel but never talk about.

Patricia Lockwood, knock on wood, is one of the funniest memoir writers I have encountered, and that’s coming from a veteran reader with shelves of dog-eared memoirs.  In essence, Priestdaddy is her irreverent send-up of life in the care of a bombastic Catholic priest, who, because of a special exemption for already-wedded converts, is allowed to serve parishes while raising his own family.

This Father Lockwood is no ordinary father.  When not wearing a clergy collar, he lounges around the rectory in tighty whiteys eating beef jerky or he retreats into his study to play incomprehensibly loud riffs on an electric guitar.  Lockwood describes his music-making as follows: “When the biological urge comes upon him, he lifts his curvaceous red guitar out of its case with a hushed reverence and cradles it in his arms.  Then he plugs it into the most powerful amp that’s legal in the state of Missouri and begins rocking himself into a frenzy.  It sounds like a whole band dying in a plane crash in the year 1972.  He plays the guitar like he’s trying to take off women’s jeans, or like he’s standing nude in the middle of a thunderstorm and calling down lighting to strike his pecs.”

While reading Priestdaddy, I laughed out loud and often, but I also found Lockwood’s humor disconcerting.  Maybe that’s because I’m a father myself and she lampoons her father so mercilessly that I feel embarrassed for not only him but all us poor male schmucks who are indicted by association. I find her a bit too clever for her own pen.  And I suspect that, like many humorists, the laughter is a way to cope with tough emotions that lie underneath, emotions that just start to peek through by the end of the book.

Priestdaddy can be compared to the comical memoirs of Anne Lamott or to the ever-expanding series of family stories by David Sedaris.   But those two writers have less snark in their voices, more self-awareness and generosity.  Perhaps Lockwood, who has a wonderful ability with language, has been a bit too shaped by her earlier work as a poet.  Like most contemporary poets she seems at great pains to avoid one unforgivable cardinal sin: sentimentality.  It’s my opinion that, if she was a bit less afraid of her own emotions, she might not need to ridicule as much and she might be able to shed more light on what is at the core of the memoir, how her father’s role in the church—and his support of the male hierarchy in Catholicism—did damage to herself and how she has been able to move beyond that damage.

A final note: there is one chapter in this memoir that makes the whole book worth reading, and that is the chapter “Voice,” which is essentially a stand-alone lyric essay about Lockwood’s singing voice vs. her sister’s singing voice vs. that of a girl who was the best singer in their chorus.  Presumably this piece is about singing, but it is really about much much more—such as transcendence and femininity and pain and “the intolerable sadness of the human condition.” If you read it, you will see that Lockwood moves far beyond comedic entertainment, letting her emotions ring through in a completely engaging way.  Like I said, it is worth the whole price of the book, so don’t hesitate to buy a copy.

Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams 
by Dustin Parsons (Goodreads Author)

Tim Bascom‘s review 

Using diagrams and short, lyric essays, Dustin Parsons offers the reader a fascinating look inside the head of a young father, with all the attendant shadows of his own childhood present as he moves into marriage and parenting. This is not a book that builds a narrative arc, pulling the reader forward by dramatic action or suspense. It’s a quiet, thoughtful book full of reflective insight and lovely language. Read it like you would read a collection of poetry, and you will be satisfied.