H Is for Hawk (2014) is British author Helen MacDonald’s award-winning memoir about her attempts to train a goshawk named Mabel in the wake of her father’s death. It is a memoir of grief, self-discovery, and the healing power of nature. MacDonald intersperses her descriptions of training Mabel with references to the memoirs of T.H. White, who writes about his own hapless attempts at falconry in the 1930s. The memoir was an instant bestseller and was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year. It featured on more than 25 other “Best Books of the Year” lists, including Time, NPR, O the Oprah Magazine, Vogue, and many more.

This book refers to the 2014 Grove Press paperback edition.

Content warning: This book depicts a historical figure who seeks to “tame” his same-sex attraction. This guide preserves the author’s intentions in depicting this outdated, harmful concept.

Summary

Soon after a trip to the Brecklands, north-east of Cambridge, England, academic and falconer Helen MacDonald learns that her father has died. She was close to her father, and the news is devastating. It was her father that taught her to look closely at the world around her, and who helped contribute to her love of nature and of falconry—that is, the training of birds of prey by human beings. As a child, she read voraciously on the subject. Of these creatures, MacDonald is fascinated by the raw power of the goshawk. The power of the grief she feels for her father’s death surprises her, and she begins to recede from the company of other people. Her mind begins to fixate on hawks as a way of setting aside her powerful emotions. She contacts a breeder, and within a short time, she has found a small female goshawk named Mabel. Though she has trained falcons in the past, Mabel is her first hawk. Hawks are famously stubborn, posing special challenges to train.

As she recounts the difficult breaking-in period of hawk training, she compares her experience with that of another falconer, T.H. White. Today, White is best known for writing The Once and Future King, a series retelling Arthurian legends for a modern audience. In 1937, as a young man, he wrote a memoir of falconry called The Goshawk, and this is MacDonald's point of interest. While it became a literary classic, The Goshawk is notably a terrible guide to falconry; White overfed his hawk, and either paid too much attention to his hawk or not enough. Eventually, White’s hawk broke its line and flew away, never to return, which put an end to White’s terrible experience with falconry. The Goshawk is a classic not because it is a good guide to falconry, but because it capably depicts White’s struggle with himself, in spite of his failures, while drawing upon White’s considerable knowledge of history and literature. MacDonald posits that White’s depiction of his struggle with his hawk is emblematic of his struggle with his own feelings of same-sex attraction at a time when such feelings were considered unnatural and unacceptable.

MacDonald intersperses her interpretation of White’s work with a memoir of her own struggles with Mabel, and with her journey towards reconciling herself to her father’s death. As she adeptly trains her hawk first to acclimate to her company and then to fly away and return to her, she conversely loses control of her life. She turns down academic jobs, avoids the company of her friends, and takes up temporary residence in a friend's house, losing her sense of home. When her thoughts turn toward her father, she feels terrible grief. Soon, she begins to take the hawk’s ruthlessness and isolation as a model for human behavior; such a model cools the fire of her depression. However, upon meeting some of her father’s colleagues, who spoke warmly of her father’s sense of connectedness in life, and going on antidepressants, MacDonald soon realizes that she had fallen into a trap many falconers, including White, had fallen into before her. She comes to realize that hawks are not models for human behavior at all. Their value is distinct from what makes humanity worthwhile; hawks are beautiful because of their primacy and efficiency, while humanity is beautiful because of its connection and empathy.