Featherhood: A Memoir of Two Fathers and a Magpie

by Charlie Gilmour Narrated by Charlie Gilmour

Overview

In this “vivid...lovely and inviting” (The New York Times) coming-of-age memoir-the “best piece of nature writing since H Is for Hawk” (Neil Gaiman)-a young man saves a baby magpie as his estranged father is dying, only to find that caring for the bird saves him.

This is a story of two men who could talk to birds-but were completely incapable of talking to each other.

A father who fled from his family in the dead of night, and the jackdaw he raised like a child.

A son obsessed with his absence-and the young magpie that fell into his path and refused to fly away.

This is a story about the crow family and human family; about repetition across generations and birds that run in the blood; about a terror of repeating the sins of the father and a desire to build a nest of one's own.

Editorial Reviews

JANUARY 2021 - AudioFile

With his English accent and languid yet expressive voice, author/narrator Charlie Gilmour is charming company. His deep, abiding love for his family is obvious. He adores his wife, Yana—he sounds almost amazed by her—and he finds purpose and healing in caring for their accidental pet, a magpie they name Benzene (for the industrial site where they found the little chick). Although Gilmour describes his childhood as loving and safe, he carries emotional scars from his father, Heathcote Williams, who abandoned him as a baby and who rebuffed Gilmour’s periodic efforts to build a relationship. Gilmour dives deep into Heathcote’s childhood and failed marriages to face his own mental health challenges. In an odd synchronicity, Heathcote once adopted a jackdaw. In both word and performance, FEATHERHOOD is reflective, poetic, and full of wry bird moments. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

11/02/2020

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. (Jan.)

From the Publisher

"Vivid ... when the writing turns to his present, multigenerational, blended family, bird included, the scenes are lush with the warmth and comfort of everyday living ... [Gilmour] is fearless in sharing himself with readers. As he works through his relationships, the emotional freight is not always subtle, but this comes from a generosity and openness on his part, which, ultimately, is what makes Featherhood so lovely and inviting."
—The New York Times

“This will undoubtedly be held up alongside H is for Hawk ... [A] work of magpie investigation that ranks among the best modern coming-of-age memoirs.”
—The Sunday Times, Best Memoirs of 2020

"Engrossing ... At once droll and wise, this is an unforgettable memoir."
—Christian Science Monitor

"A moving account of [Gilmour's] attempts to make sense of his deeply complicated father while assessing his own suitability for fatherhood, wrestling with the question of nature versus nurture, all while caring for a magpie."
—The Times

"This absorbing memoir is touching, painful, and honest."
—Christian Science Monitor

"When the author decided to raise a baby magpie, he had no idea it would quiet his stormy emotions and help him reconcile with the father who'd abandoned him. Screeching, stealing, burying meat in Gilmour's hair, this bird is a winning heroine—delightful on paper, harrowing to live with."
—People

"With razor-sharp wit and storytelling, Gilmour interweaves the story of this bird, whom he and his partner named Benzene, with that of his past ... Featherhood represents the debut of a talented young writer reckoning with an unusual past."
—BookPage

"Thoughtful ... [an] intimate, entertaining story ... the book soars ... Featherhood is an incisive, funny and at times traumatic study of the damage done by destructive father-son relationships and the struggle to smash generational cycles."
—Evening Standard

"A profound exploration of grief, fragmented families, nature versus nurture and whether we are doomed to repeat the sins of our fathers. But it is also a gladdening celebration of what it is to nurture and bring forth new life."
—Sunday Express

“Gilmour’s language is as precise as his gaze is forensic. He is something of a magician himself, conjuring whole vivid personalities with a few deft strokes of his pen.”
—Daily Mail

"In a captivating memoir, Gilmour recounts his frustrating search for his father, Heathcote Williams, who abruptly disappeared when he was 6 months old ... 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.” ... A sensitive, often moving chronicle of transformation for bird and man."
—Kirkus, starred review

"Born to write, Gilmour interweaves intimate observations of magpie behavior with bird science; an astonishing family history; psychological struggles ... 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,” —Booklist, starred review

"Moving . . . 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." —Publishers Weekly

"Featherhoodis one of the best books I’ve ever read. I urge you to seek it out, buy it, and be enchanted. It's incredibly moving and I loved every single page."
—Elton John

"Wonderful – I can’t recommend it too highly."
—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk

“Featherhood is an astonishing achievement: a book about fathers and their children, about magicians and birds, about the hurt we pass on from generation to generation, and the ways we can try to heal. It's a journey that we take with a magpie, across the decades of Charlie's life, and the life of his biological father. It's the best piece of nature writing since H is for Hawk, and the most powerful work of biography I have read in years. It announces Charlie Gilmour as a major new writing talent, as he weaves words like a poet and offers us continual small treasures like a magpie.”
—Neil Gaiman

"A wonderful, moving book. The story of Gilmour’s family is deeply felt. His account of raising a young magpie offers a lovely insight into this fascinating bird. The two stories intertwine gracefully and perceptively, bringing solace and understanding with them."
—James Macdonald Lockhart, author of Raptor

“Featherhood, Charlie Gilmour’s miraculous account of his life raising a magpie, shows us that learning how to fly is as hard for a bird as it is for a young man, especially when that young man’s father weighs on him like a rock. Gilmour is a hero, for surviving the horrible storms he flew through before he met the magpie, and for the magic he glides through after.
—Robert Sullivan, author of Cross Country

"Featherhood is a good time in a weird way – I have never read anything so filthy."
—Nell Zink, author of The Wall Creeper

"I loved Featherhood. About nature and growth, about belonging and not belonging, it is beautiful."
—Andrew O’Hagan, author of The Illuminations

"What a breath-taking, beautiful book Featherhood is! Utterly absorbing, astonishingly well-written, full of heart. It's the most arresting book I've read for a very long time, so original and glittering and true. It's wonderful."
—Cressida Connolly, author of After the Party

"Beautiful, wise, compassionate and powerful, Featherhood is one of those rare, enchanted books that sings to the soul of what it is to be."
—Isabella Tree, author of Wilding

"The extraordinary story of an extraordinary family."
—Sophie Heawood, author of The Hangover Games

"What a book! I was entranced. It is so blood soaked and yet so warm, so beautiful, so hopeful. A personal reckoning which is simultaneously brutal and joyous. It’s full of light. I have that feeling I have with a very good book that I want to tell everyone about it."
—Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act of Love and A Manual for Heartache

"Featherhood is a beautiful book, sensitive and compelling – it made me cry."
—Simon Amstell

“This stunning memoir flashes with as many colours as its enchanting subject, and draws us into a world of eccentric characters impossible to predict or forget. Savage, mischievous, moving, sublime.”
—Rhik Samadder, author of I Never Said I Loved You

Library Journal

12/11/2020

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

JANUARY 2021 - AudioFile

With his English accent and languid yet expressive voice, author/narrator Charlie Gilmour is charming company. His deep, abiding love for his family is obvious. He adores his wife, Yana—he sounds almost amazed by her—and he finds purpose and healing in caring for their accidental pet, a magpie they name Benzene (for the industrial site where they found the little chick). Although Gilmour describes his childhood as loving and safe, he carries emotional scars from his father, Heathcote Williams, who abandoned him as a baby and who rebuffed Gilmour’s periodic efforts to build a relationship. Gilmour dives deep into Heathcote’s childhood and failed marriages to face his own mental health challenges. In an odd synchronicity, Heathcote once adopted a jackdaw. In both word and performance, FEATHERHOOD is reflective, poetic, and full of wry bird moments. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177108896
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	01/05/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
Yana sets the cardboard box, with its precious contents, very gently down on our bedroom floor. Her sister found it this morning, she explains, and picked it up and brought it to their workshop. In between hammering and drilling they’ve been feeding it live grubs from the angling supplier. The grubs bite, Yana continues matter-of-factly, so you have to crush their heads a little with pliers or a fingernail before sending them down the bird’s hatch. She raises the flaps of the box.

A black-and-white ball of fluff the size of a child’s fist is curled up in a corner. It looks dead. It smells dead. I click my tongue at the creature and one of its eyelids flutters open. Its eye is mineral blue.

I try to call to mind everything I know about magpies. At first, all I can come up with is the nursery rhyme “One for sorrow” and an image of my mum religiously saluting any she encountered on the farm I grew up on, to ward off the bad luck they’re supposed to bring. Better safe than sorry, I think, touching my hand to the side of my head as I peer down into the box. Yana says they’re clever birds—very clever, as all members of the crow family are—although I seem to recall that they’re widely disliked for reasons I’ve never quite understood. Something about them eating baby songbirds and consorting with the devil. And they’re said to have a pirate’s eye for stolen treasure—a lost wedding ring should be looked for in the nearest magpie nest. Other than saluting it, I have no idea what you’re meant to do with one. I’ve cared for injured wildlife before in a vague sort of way, or at least I tried to as a kid: creatures the cat dragged in, broken squirrels, birds that had jerked their brains to jelly against windowpanes. No matter what you do, it seems like they always end up in the same place: a shoebox at the bottom of a shallow grave. Even healthy animals haven’t had the best of luck in my hands. I think guiltily of the beautiful white doves we had years ago, which my grandmother, my mother, and I dyed pastel pink and released on the farm—only for them to be gobbled up by the fox like so much cotton candy. If I’d been the one to come across this bird, I suspect I might have been tempted to let it take its chances down in the gutter. I’m not sure what we can do for it, except perhaps prolong its suffering.

I look from the bird to Yana. She’s dressed, as usual for a workday, in a dark blue, paint-spattered coverall and heavy boots. Her light brown hair is held tightly in place with pins in a precise and severe style that adds a few grades of sharpness to her high and prominent cheekbones. She’s already busy with the pliers. I watch as she goes snapping after a writhing yellow grub with her metallic beak and clamps down on its head. Pale goo oozes from both ends of the unfortunate grub as she waves it enticingly above the baby magpie. This is typical behavior. Yana is incapable of encountering a broken object without wanting to pick it up and make it better. I suppose she’s something of a magpie herself: not a thief, exactly, but certainly a hoarder of found treasure. She always has a screwdriver at hand and rarely seems to think twice about dragging abandoned light fixtures, or slabs of marble, or enormous sacks of rocks that she’s collected from the foreshore of the Thames back to our house. Our home is filled with things she’s made or fixed: from shelves, to mugs, to knives, to the chairs we sit on and the trousers I wear. She takes special delight in suspending things from the ceiling. In the living room, a chandelier she made from sharp glass stalactites rattles whenever large vehicles go past; above our bed a framework of bamboo and string and trailing vines has turned our room into a jungle. She attributes her DIY attitude to having grown up as one of six siblings in a busy immigrant family. Her parents fled to Sweden from Soviet Ukraine with their children and whatever else they could carry, leaving the USSR to collapse behind them. It was a chaotic environment and having the ability to make your own clothes as well as your own fun came at a premium.

I first met her two years ago at a party in a disused carwash in Lewisham. She appeared from behind a concrete pillar with peroxide-blond hair and demonic-red eye makeup and hooked me with a glance. Later, she took me back to her place and showed me her albino snake, her orchid mantis, and her collection of homemade knives. Not long after that we moved in together and were swiftly engaged. It’s all been very sudden, so much so that I’m slightly unsure as to how I’ve arrived at this point. At times I feel a little like one of her found objects. I certainly never imagined myself settling down in my twenties. Last time I checked, I had a shaved head, bruised knuckles, and was heading for a fall. Now I seem to be getting married, making a nest. Sometimes I’m convinced I’ve dreamt all this up, and everything could vanish as easily as waking. At other times, the opposite seems true: that I’m slowly regaining consciousness after a long and tiring nightmare. I don’t know if it was Yana’s willingness to take on the defective that drew her to me—I somehow doubt it. But her strength, solidity, invulnerability were certainly some of the qualities that pulled me to her.

Now this bad-luck bird has arrived. A dream-thing regarding Yana’s dying worm suspiciously from its corner of the box. Both of its eyes are open now. Blue. I never knew that a young magpie’s eyes were blue. All the magpies I’ve seen in the past, chattering in trees, or picking apart carcasses on roadsides, must have been adults, their eyes glinting obsidian. Though this bird’s eyes are fully unshuttered, its sharp black beak remains stubbornly closed, no matter how Yana tries to tempt it. She mutters something under her breath that sounds like “stupid magpie” and sets her pliers down. Fixing this broken little crow might, I suspect, be beyond even her powers of repair.

“Isn’t there someone else who can deal with this?” I say. “Like, I don’t know, a vet?”

Yana rolls her eyes at me as if I’d just suggested hiring an electrician to come and change a lightbulb. Which is, to be fair, exactly the sort of thing I might try to do—for the lightbulb’s sake. If Yana represents order, then I am chaos. Things just seem to fall apart in my hands, and this bird is all too breakable.

Yana waves me away and picks up the pliers again. She crushes a fresh worm and makes another pass at the magpie, this time emitting odd high-pitched chirruping noises and clacking her metal beak—just like, she claims, a mother magpie would do in the wild. With a sudden burst of energy, the bird’s beak springs open and it begins to whistle like a kettle on the boil. Yana drops the worm into the bird’s bright pink maw and in a single gulp it’s gone. Clearly there’s some life in the creature yet.

Yana passes me a grub from the plastic box in her tool bag. “Your turn,” she says as the grub pulsates across the surface of my palm, yellow and faintly hairy, like a severed toe spasming away. I use the pliers to crush its head and then play mother. Reliable as a clockwork cuckoo, the bird opens wide. Its fragility terrifies me. Bone china with a feather boa. I gingerly set the reflexively squirming grub into its beak and wait for it to start chomping, but instead the bird just carries on screaming and the grub rolls out.

“You have to really shove it in,” says Yana, stabbing at the air with her index finger.

I abandon the pliers. I can’t bear to use such a hard metal implement on something so soft and delicate. I push the grub toward the rim of the bird’s black throat with the tip of my finger instead. The bird’s squealing intensifies, and then morphs into a sort of gremlin-like yum-yum as peristalsis kicks in and the worm is taken down below. The bird doesn’t stop there. I feel the strong, circular muscles of its esophagus convulse against the end of my finger as it tries to swallow me too. I swiftly withdraw my hand. The bird chirps, tucks its head beside its wing, and falls back to sleep.

“What now?” I say.

“Get more worms,” Yana says. “I think we’ll have to feed it every twenty minutes and we’re already running out.”

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