H Is for Hawk
After her father's sudden death, the author sets out to train a wild goshawk — a book about how grief can, and cannot, be tamed through a relationship with a wild animal.
Helen Macdonald, a falconer and academic, loses her father — a photojournalist who dies suddenly — and responds to grief by acquiring and training a goshawk named Mabel, one of the most notoriously difficult birds of prey to work with. The book runs three strands at once: a detailed, almost technical account of the training itself, drawn from centuries of falconry tradition; her own gradual withdrawal from human company into the bird's, as a response to grief; and a parallel study of the writer T. H. White, who decades earlier wrote his own memoir of a failed attempt to train a hawk, and whose damaged, largely self-destructive life becomes a cautionary counterpart to her own story. Goshawks, unlike more biddable falcons, are notorious among falconers for unpredictability and aggression, and the choice of this particular bird reads as deliberate: Macdonald is not looking for a calm companion but for a creature beside which she cannot pretend everything is fine.
The book's central argument is that the impulse to dissolve into a wild, nonhuman creature during grief can look like healing while actually cutting both ways: it can become not a way of working through loss but a way of disappearing entirely from human relationships and from grief itself. The hawk does not console her in any sentimentalized, humanized sense — the book deliberately resists the easy image of nature as cure. Only later, recognizing in White's story her own temptation — a self-destructive flight into cruelty toward the bird — does Macdonald begin to separate her genuine need to mourn from a wish to dissolve into wildness and stop being human.
Structurally, chapters on training the hawk alternate with chapters on White's biography and with memories of her father; the argument builds through juxtaposition of these three threads rather than through direct statement.
The book asks readers to be wary of any story that treats nature as therapy, even as it shows convincingly how disciplined, absorbing attention to another creature can temporarily hold a grieving mind together. In the end, it is a book about the difference between using an animal to escape one's own humanity and using the relationship to relearn how to be human again.
Key ideas
- Training a wild goshawk is presented as an exacting, disciplined practice rather than a metaphor — the technical side matters as much as the emotional one.
- Retreating into an animal's company during grief can be not a way of working through loss but a way of disappearing from human relationships altogether.
- The parallel biography of T. H. White functions as a warning: his self-destructive cruelty toward his own hawk is a temptation the author recognizes in herself.
- The book deliberately avoids the sentimental idea that nature heals — the bird does not console her but demands discipline and presence instead.
- The book's final distinction is between using an animal to escape one's own humanity and using the relationship with it to relearn how to be human.
Related moments
- The Order of Time (2017)
A physicist takes time apart piece by piece and argues that the single, forward-flowing time we experience most likely does not exist at the level of fundamental reality at all.
- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
A history of humankind read as a history of shared fictions that got millions of strangers to cooperate as one.
- Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death (2008)
A psychotherapist with half a century of clinical practice examines how the fear of death quietly steers ordinary life, and maps out ways of living alongside that fear rather than suppressing it.
- The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
A chronicle of the year following her husband's sudden death — a writer's attempt to describe how grief actually works from the inside, against every cultural cliché about how mourning is supposed to look.