FEATHERHOOD

A wily, endearing bird becomes central to a man's life.

Like Helen Macdonald, who took to training a goshawk after her father’s death, Gilmour, who spent much of his life trying to understand the biological father who abandoned him, found wisdom and solace from caring for an orphaned magpie. In a captivating memoir, Gilmour recounts his frustrating search for his father, Heathcote Williams, who abruptly disappeared when he was 6 months old. Heathcote, writes the author, was a “squatter, writer, actor, alcoholic, poet, anarchist, magician, revolutionary, and Old Etonian. A wild-haired icon of the radical sixties underground whose plays and essays rode the twin currents of psychedelia and sex.” After his mother married rock musician David Gilmour, Charlie found himself ensconced in a family with many siblings and a new adoptive father; still, he felt an abiding sense “of loss and longing; a feeling of homesickness for a home I’d never really known.” As Heathcote repeatedly rebuffed Charlie’s efforts to connect, his son descended into “psychological self-immolation,” depression, and mania. By his late teens, he was seriously abusing drugs; after one manic episode, he landed in prison. Interwoven with his narrative of pain and sadness is his relationship with a magpie that he and his ever patient fiancee rescued and nursed to health. Benzene, as they named her, lived with the couple for two years, treated more like “a medieval prince” than a bird, indulged royally with “music, flowers, shiny baubles, and meat.” Benzene’s growing strength and independence mirrored Gilmour’s emergence from oppressive grief. When Gilmour finally confronted evidence of his father’s long history of mental instability, Benzene served as an “an airy spirit who ke[pt] me afloat.” Eventually, the author gained perspective on the causes of his father’s abandonment, and he assuaged his fears about his own mind: “who your father is,” he realizes, “isn’t who you have to be.” Though not quite on that level, this one will fit nicely on the shelf next to H Is for Hawk.

A sensitive, often moving chronicle of transformation for bird and man.