Featherhood

October 15, 2020
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.

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November 2, 2020
Journalist Gilmour debuts with a moving chronicle of his transition from being “a serial shirker of responsibility” to a devoted family man. His story begins as he and his girlfriend, Yana, are given an ailing baby magpie, which they named Benzene. Then, upon learning his estranged father had once adopted a wounded jackdaw, Gilmour embarked on an examination of their lives (“How can I stop myself from repeating his mistakes?”) to look for answers about why his father, a poet, abandoned him and his mother when he was five years old. Though Gilmour writes that he felt “essentially flawed” he also realized he needed “to get the sort of help never did.” Upon reading his deceased father’s journals, he realized his father saw Gilmour and his older half-sisters as representative of a family life that would constrain his artistic endeavors. Meanwhile, caring for Benzene provides the catalyst for Gilmour to question his own feelings about parenthood and his fears of being a father, leading to his desire to start a family. The author’s introspection is rewarding without becoming maudlin, and his poetic take on the complexities of father/son relationships resonates. This spirited outing hits all the right buttons for memoir lovers.

December 1, 2020
A magpie nestling is found abandoned on a London pavement and soon Gilmour is sharing every aspect of his life with this willful little being. As he researches magpies and seeks advice from his grandmother, a writer who served in Mao's Red Army, Gilmour's writer mother tells him that his biological father, Heathcote Williams, a counterculture poet, playwright, and activist who abandoned them when Charlie was a mere fledgling, once raised an orphaned jackdaw, a bird in the same family as magpies and crows. As Gilmour and his set-designer girlfriend allow the magpie free-range in their home, resulting in a filthy mess outshone by endearing and wondrous moments, Gilmour is finally able to face the damage done by Heathcote's absence and attempt a relationship. Born to write, Gilmour interweaves intimate observations of magpie behavior with bird science; an astonishing family history; psychological struggles; his upcoming marriage; his reconciliation with an ailing Heathcote; his gratitude for his adoptive dad, musician David Gilmour of Pink Floyd fame; and his trepidation about becoming a father himself. His prose is as darkly iridescent as the magpie's feathers, his wit is winged, and he is as tenacious in his gathering of memories and facts as the magpie is with food and objects. A resplendent interspecies memoir of nature, nurture, revelation, and love.

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December 11, 2020

British author Gilmour, son of poet and dramatist Heathcote Williams, struggled for years to establish a relationship with the parent who abandoned him. Fostering a newly-hatched magpie provides Gilmour with insights into the complex demands and rewards of parenting, both human and avian. Searching for and dreading genetic and psychic links to his absent father, Gilmour explores his own weaknesses, values, and strengths, and comes to recognize what he has gained from the family his mother and adoptive father drew him into. One of his strengths is a talent for descriptive writing. He brings readers into a number of physical and psychological habitats occupied by Heathcote or himself, portraying sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures displayed from what he imagines as a bird's point of view as well as his own. His memoir is populated by close observation of and information about weather, the environment, plants, and animals as well as "moments of mental volatility" displayed by the central characters. "Nurture trumps nature" is one of Gilmour's conclusions on the questions of parenting. VERDICT This reflective memoir will engage a variety of readers, and will be of great interest to anyone who has ever considered parenting, human or avian.--Joel Neuberg, Santa Rosa Junior Coll. Lib., CA

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